The GOAT is back. Roger Federer, the 38-year-old Swiss tennis great, winner of 20 Grand Slam men’s singles titles and current number 5 in the world, has entered to play in Dubai on March 14.
This comes right after Fed declared for Doha on March 8, his first appearance in Qatar since 2012.
While Federer has been scarce in Doha over the last decade, Dubai has long been a home to the player, and he’s been training for his comeback in the emirate for months.
Federer narrowly made the Monday deadline to submit for the Dubai tournament, an event which Djokovic won in 2020 but Federer has dominated eight times, last winning in 2019.
Federer is not a part of the Australian Open in Melbourne, as he reportedly only started hitting balls on the court in December 2020, taking six months to recover from his right knee surgery, his second, which was performed in June of last year.
It will have been 14 long months since Federer last participated in a tournament, and the Tennis world has been eagerly awaiting his return, after a 2020 dominated by Djokovic’s controversial antics. Djokovic himself, 33, has a lot of opinions about why his accomplishments aren’t seen in the same light as Federer’s.
“If we begin to discuss that, we won’t finish this evening. Presumably there are millions of different reasons,” the world’s number one told Serbian journalist Sasha Osmo.
Doha is an ATP 250, whereas Dubai is a more prestigious ATP 500, an upgrade it received in 2001, after being an ATP 250 tournament from 1993 until 2000, the year the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships debuted at the Aviation Club.
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