Inside Tennis Star Novak Djokovic’s Private World With Wife Jelena

So, no, work hasn’t been going so hot for the dad of two.

And, yet, despite his earliest exit in a Grand Slam since the 2006 Australian Open, one could argue the 39-year-old stays winning. 

Having banked nearly $200 million in career prize money and netted partnerships with Hublot, Lacoste and Qatar Airways, the athlete—named a global strategic advisor for investment firm General Atlantic in June—is able to hold court in New York City, Monaco, Spain and Greece. 

And until 2025, home court for he and wife Jelena Djokovic—they wed in Montenegro three months before welcoming son Stefan in October 2014—was a three-bedroom penthouse overlooking Lake Pavlova in their native Belgrade. 

The pair had founded his eponymous foundation there, focused on early childhood education (Jelena serves as the global CEO), and built the 14-court Novak Tennis Center, while his parents Srdjan and Dijana served up the Novak 1 Cafe & Restaurant. 

But in November, Novak confirmed the chatter that they’d decamped to Athens amid ongoing tensions between him and the Serbian government. 

Of course, more often than not, Novak finds himself bunking somewhere else entirely. 

When on the tennis circuit, “missing out on some important dates and events in their life…it’s hard,” he admitted on CBS Mornings in July of budding tennis player Stefan and Tara, who’s more interested in ballet and gymnastics than the family business. “That’s why I don’t play as much as I used to, because I want to be the best husband, father, brother, son that I could possibly be.”

It’s what’s driven him since he picked up a racket at age 4, despite coming from a family of professional skiers. Asked the quote he lived by, Novak told ATPTour.com last November, “One of my favorites is, ‘There is no elevator to success, you have to take the stairs.'”

And he and Jelena, 40, have shared quite the climb. 

Despite meeting in high school in the late ’90s, they reconnected in 2005 while she was studying in Milan, spending much of their early years on opposite ends of the proverbial court. 

“I was a student barely getting by, and he was a very young tennis player who also had no money to spare on expensive trips,” she has explained. “Airplanes were, at the time, something utterly out of our reach. We contrived and devised these plans how to meet, how to make our relationship work.”

Among their strategies is knowing when to volley any issues around, Novak recently noting to People, “the more you keep it inside, the more the monster grows.”

By the time he wed the business grad at a five-star resort overlooking the Adriatic Sea, he was days removed from winning his second Wimbledon title and building his reported $30 million fortune, something he knows wouldn’t have been possible without his forever pairs partner. 

“She’s the only serious relationship I ever had,” he told People. “She’s been my girlfriend, fiancée and my wife for more than 20 years, and I’m eternally grateful for her love, her support, the relationship that has evolved over the years.”

And he’s not the only tennis start to net a strong romance. We’re serving up the details on how other athletes scored their winning relationships.