For the first time in his career, the Spanish champion will not play at Roland Garros.
Carlos Moyá is relaxed, holding his hands behind his back. He wears sunglasses and, even if he doesn’t see his gaze, every now and then he lets himself go to a shy, circumstantial smile. It’s the coach’s role: to appear reassuring, lucid, detached. This time, however, he is useless. Rafael Nadal he collapses on his knees and for a handful of seconds time crystallizes. He remains motionless, his face pointing to the ground, his feet held too close as if his body were dominated by a fit of awkwardness. A young man approaches him – we cannot know who – and perhaps he asks him how he is doing. Nadal scrapes together the last bit of energy he can draw from his own consumed flesh. He puts his hands on his hips and shakes his head.
A year has passed since the victory of the twenty-second Grand Slam, the most unexpected Roland Garros. In every game of that tournament, Nadal had fought Faustianly against his left foot, afflicted with the congenital sindrome di Müller-Weiss. Nadal had accepted a pact with the devil: he played thanks to injections that numb the nerves in his foot, so as to anesthetize the pain. How long would that martyrdom last? Even earlier, in Rome, he had been defeated by Shapovalov in the round of 16. Nadal limped between ends, torn by pain. More than the sublimation of an endless career, therefore, the 14th Roland Garros had been the epitome of Nadal’s religious sacrifice to be able to play tennis again. Or at least that’s how we remember him today.
Only a year has passed since that fleeting moment of happiness – «I never thought I’d be here» He said after the final – but it must have been a lifetime for Nadal.
Worrying images arrive from Rafa Nadal’s training session today. The psoas recovery deadlines have long since ceased to be met, and it seems evident that it is still further from 100% than we thought.
Roland Garros, in just over 15 days. pic.twitter.com/DG1m619B2o
— Hugo Durán (@CroniSport) May 11, 2023
The video is cruel. In Manacor, where Nadal built his Academy, the sun beats down on the tennis courts. It’s the first days of May and the air is seaside, the omen of a summer that is already knocking. After the grimaces that give back the idea of his difficulty in even dealing with his own body, Nadal stops training. It was fifteen days before Roland Garros and Nadal could hardly keep up.
The official announcement of his absence from Paris comes a few days later, in a conference short and concise. Nadal has always been a tennis diplomat, most prone to messaging his fans like a bored emperor. Yet as the conference continues, the tranquility disappears from Nadal’s proxemics. His face darkens, he raises an eyebrow when he talks about the iliopsoas problem – a hip muscle – that he has been suffering from since January 2023. he should have kept it out four to six weeks, and instead it’s been six months. In this period Nadal showed himself very little, and each time we found him more frowning. Sometimes Nadal looks like a ghost who realizes he’s dead. Are the limits of the body to climb finished?
We already understood that something was wrong with his physique in the middle of 2022. Nadal had found himself in an unpredictable condition at the beginning of the season. His form continued to be shaky, but he had won the first two Grand Slams of the year. The first had come in Australia against Daniil Medvedev al quinto set, in a tactical battle lasting more than five hours. Against a 25-year-old tennis player, it was still him, the old man on the threshold of retirement, who gave ethics lessons. “At the end of the game I asked him: aren’t you tired?” he had tried to play down Medvdev, who had gone up by two sets to zero.
Nadal had been out for six months and no one would have expected such a comeback. He had risked losing already contro Shapovalov in the quarterfinals, his tennis was solid but blunted with its usual brutality. With Moyà he had decided to work the first service, thickening that fundamental to limit exchanges. The greatest tennis player on clay, the one who enjoyed exhausting his opponents with rallies that seemed to never end, had now even introduced the serve and volley to shorten the game.
To win, Nadal had needed to go around the limits of bodily immanence again. In the end his classico hooked forehand, performed by harpooning the ball when it seemed to have already escaped, was cloaked in a unique drop of splendour. He had tried it a few times, as if even his old shots were too weary for this nihilistic version. Rafa Nadal as the last Stoic philosopher, Therefore. Exponent of an inhuman discipline, which confronts him every day with his finitude. There is only one way Nadal has won throughout his career and that is through mental ferocity.
Watch as Nadal wins the big points in the fifth set. He can no longer run like a mad horse from one corner to the other and therefore increases his brain control over the switches. In the match Medvedev will have also reached higher peaks, but he could not avoid the defeat against a tennis as spiritual as Nadal’s. A tennis that never abandons him, which continually puts him in front of the atrocious consumption of his physique.
Nadal’s season had continued with the victory in Acapulco – where he had returned to beat Medvedev, this time in the semifinals – and even in Indian Wells no other tennis player seemed to get in his way. We began to discuss the veracity of his injuries, someone has advanced the hypothesis that he was pretending. How could such a worn-out player have no rivals? Then there was the IW final against Taylor Fritz and maybe that’s where we understood how much Nadal’s tennis was held up by an invisible thread. In the semifinals he had won the usurpation battle control Carlos Alcaraz amidst a western-like windstorm, but her torso buckled at the pace. Nadal had decided not to retire and still played the final, then lost, against Fritz with a torn pectoral: «I tried to do my best, but today it was not possible. Congratulations to Taylor, he played well ».
To write this piece, I decided to talk to a friend of mine, a tennis enthusiast and a fan of Nadal more or less forever. When I asked him how he is experiencing this difficult moment, in which those physical problems have become chronic in an embarrassing fragility, he replied: “I know it’s an overused word, but I can’t help but say that Nadal’s is a senseless test of resilience. There’s no way to rationalize all this suffering.”. And basically this image of Rafa Nadal is true, capable of bending over in front of his own body without succumbing and coming back more and more fierce.
We have become accustomed to athletes who return the Platonic idea of physical perfection. As an audience, we are the first to be frightened by their weaknesses. We demand the absolute and if we don’t receive it we panic. The outburst of Giannis Antetokounmpo to get to talking about the topos of sporting failure. In tennis this rhetoric reaches further peaks if possible. Each match is a solitary battle, one “no contact boxing” to quote Andre Agassi. In such a context, the ability to perform physically, to have a perfect body, is essential. As the doctor once said Ferdie Pacheco by Muhammad Ali: “If they had asked me for the strongest specimen of human being, I would have brought them Muhammad. His body was perfect: if he had a cold, he would heal in a day.’
Rafael Nadal has always been imperfect. At 19 it was clear that the bio-mechanics of his blows – ravenous, angry, intense beyond human – would destroy his knees, and they did. In 2012 he came close to retiring after injuring his kneecap. His technical sponsor, Nike, he had to build an ad hoc shoe for his foot. If today Nadal is the most successful tennis player ever together with Novak Djokovic it is due to a reality glitch. It shouldn’t have gone like this: to play tennis at those levels, Nadal lived as if his sporting career were an endless Via Crucis.
Before the quarter-finals of Roland Garros 2022, Rafa Nadal had been laconic: «It could be my last game». We were ready to say goodbye, enraptured by one last epic clash with Djokovic. However, he had commanded the exchanges from the first game, draining everything the funereal aura that had surrounded Philippe Chatrier. The scenography of the red clay, seasoned by Nadal’s grunts, the cuffs that seemed to him to burst on increasingly thicker arms, accentuated the birth of the myth. Was it a tennis match or the procession of pain?
Certainly this role of martyr never went down to him. In 2018 he complained to the organizers that the surfaces were too hard. “There are too many injuries, I don’t know what will happen to us if we continue like this” said Ralph. “There is a life beyond tennis”. Yet it is strange to hear it said to him, considered by many to be the greatest agonist ever. An athlete inimitable in results, yet fragile as each of us is.
We often talk about the inhumanity of Rafa Nadal, about his ability to find inexhaustible energy. As if he were the protagonist of an anime, his spiritual strength increases in decisive moments. At the same time, fans have felt connected to him like a close relative over the past year. The empathetic bond with his pain was unrepeatable. In July he withdrew from Wimbledon with an abdominal injury before the semi-final against Kyrgios. In the quarters against Fritz he had played in the trenches; each serve was a strangled scream, one passion irrepressible. Nadal couldn’t field a first, but won in the fifth set. They still accused him of pretending, though – according to what he said Brand – the lesion was 7 millimeters deep.
Then in October, Federer retired. At the end of the game, Nadal burst into tears, inconsolable as if a part of him was gone forever. He hugged Federer, and in the most difficult moment they held hands. The Medal as the last possible love match in tennis. It was this emotion that he hid, Nadal, under that warrior patina.
Maybe I already knew the answer, but I asked my friend anyway if he expected anything from Nadal’s future in tennis other than retirement. “No, I’ve decided to drop him. For me it all ended at Roland Garros last year» he told me. As I listened to him speak I thought of the emotion with which the fans greeted Federer, I thought maybe it’s not right that Nadal can’t get a similar tribute. My friend continued: “My heart didn’t follow his suffering”.
We will talk at length about Rafa Nadal, about his having revealed himself – after all – as ephemeral as all human beings. And it was even more special to see him fight against his own nature to prolong his exceptionality for as long as possible. Today he risks dropping out of the top 500, we don’t know if and when he will return to play tennis. Even if he were to return to the field, would he change anything?
Rafael Nadal was the opposite of the divinity with which Federer was enveloped. Over time he has approached that metaphysical parable, giving us his most essential talent. Watching him play wasn’t a good experience in itself. It was a moral, intimate, human lesson from which we started to reflect on ourselves. Nadal played tennis, was tennis in its deep psychological nature. He reminded us that tennis can lighten life, make it more acceptable. And he communicated all these things to us while remaining himself, even when we found him without energy to finish training.
Nadal could not have done more.