Former champion Novak Djokovic has blamed a stomach bug for his five-set, quarter-final defeat to Frenchman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga at Melbourne Park on Wednesday night.
The Serbian No.3 seed appeared in complete control when he won the second and third sets but things quickly began to unravel for him early in the fourth set and he 'had to go to the toilet ... otherwise I would throw up on the court'.
Djokovic fought on valiantly but having taken the third set he managed to win only four more games as Tsonga went on to win 7-6 (10-8) 6-7 (5-7) 1-6 6-3 6-1 in a rematch of the 2008 Melbourne Park final.
When he faced the media after bowing out in the quarter-finals for the second year in a row, having 12 months earlier wilted in the Melbourne heat against Andy Roddick, Djokovic firstly congratulated Tsonga and then admitted he had been battling vomiting and diarrhoea in the lead-up to the match.
"He played a great match (and) deserved to win," Djokovic said.
"(But) it was unfortunate that I couldn't perform on the level that I wanted to in the fourth and fifth set."
"I don't want to find excuses for my loss but I went to vomit and I had diarrhoea before the match."
"(It was) just a terrible feeling. It's been a great tournament for me, so it's just a bad way to (then) not to be able (to) physically go through the whole match."
Djokovic refused to be drawn on comparisons with his loss to Roddick in 2009 and confirmed that he had really started to struggle after he won the third set, preferring from that point on to try and hold on and hope Tsonga would throw it away.
"The big deal I started feeling after third set when I just, I couldn't hold on," he added.
"When you lose a lot of fluids and your engine stops working, that's how I felt."
"(It was) very bad with my legs in the fourth, and especially in the fifth set, I wasn't able to run him down at the baseline, and that was the major problem."
"I wasn't able to physically try to involve myself into the strokes, it was more like, 'Okay, let's stay on the court and hope he'll make a mistake'. That was more or less the philosophy."
Tsonga said he sympathised with his opponent but put Djokovic's illness down as 'just part of the game'.
"Sometimes you have problem with your forehand; sometimes with your backhand and sometimes with your body. You never know what's (going to) happen," he said.
"Today he had some problem with his stomach I think at the beginning of the third set, and that's it. It's good for me; bad for him. That's it."