Tennis Star’s Claim He Was Poisoned ‘Unlikely’: Experts

A tennis star’s claim that he was poisoned while in Australian detention is possible but “unlikely,” according to experts. Novak Djokovic, who was ranked world number 1 for a record career total of 428 weeks, had his visa cancelled in 2022 in Melbourne after he arrived without a COVID-19 vaccine to play in the Australian Open. In an interview with GQ published this week, he claimed he was “poisoned” while in an immigration detention hotel. “I had some discoveries when I came back to Serbia. I never told this to anybody publicly, but… I had a really high level of heavy metal. Heavy metal. I had the lead, very high level of lead and mercury,” he told the outlet. But experts have called his claim improbable. Barbara Cardoso, a nutritional biochemist at Monash University, told The Guardian that Australians had “relatively low exposure to lead and mercury” due to actions like the phasing out of lead paint. Another professor at Western Sydney University, Catharine Fleming, told the outlet that it was “hard to show causation between [Djokovic’s] acquisition of the heavy metal poisoning and the food consumed without any clinical test results.”