The end of Roger Federer’s career: an artistic work that changed the history of tennis

Will there ever be a more artistic shot on tour than Roger Federer’s backhand? What will tennis be without his art? What will become of art without his tennis? The Swiss announced his retirement and boom, a bombshell of nostalgia hit us all of a sudden. Throughout the world. More than a generation already feels the emptiness of his absence, the orphanhood of never again being able to enjoy those stylistic pictures that represented his matches in a sport that had him as the protagonist for almost two decades.

The vain discussion will remain about whether he is the best of all time, something that these days has gathered a consensus that practically homologates it. “Federer is the greatest player of all time and, incredibly, he is right now, while we are alive and can see it,” Italian writer Alessandro Baricco wrote five years ago.

Before being an outstanding and brilliant tennis player, Federer was and is an artist. An artist portrayed, drawn and written. Authors of the stature of Paul Auster, John M. Coetzee, David Foster Wallace or the aforementioned Baricco dedicated chapters or entire books to how many athletes? Isn’t that a sample of the enormous artistic size of his career?

“Federer doing a backhand crosscourt volley. And I ask myself: is it really aesthetics, or just aesthetics, that brings those moments to life for me?” wrote Coetzee, the South African Nobel Prize-winning author, in the book Here and Now, an epistolary dialogue between he and Auster in which they exchange ideas about their lives, their moods, art, sports, history and politics. “One begins by envying Federer, from there one goes on to admire him, and finally ends neither envying nor admiring him, but exalted at the revelation of what a human being can do, or at least one like him,” completes Coetzee. That admiration, from now on, will have no more live chapters. It will remain, like everything else, destined for YouTube, that immeasurable archive of the past, which also represents a void: what was and is no longer.

Biomechanics. There is another way to measure the importance of Federer in the history of tennis beyond the obvious, what was seen in a stadium or on TV, his 20 Grand Slams or the 103 titles he won throughout his career. The way is to observe the training of young people who are learning to play tennis, in Argentina and anywhere in the world. Until a few years ago, coaches who taught and sought to optimize the technique of their students through biomechanics – the study of human movement – ​​used drawn or computerized figures as models. For some time now, these drawings have been replaced by images and videos of the Swiss, who from the initial to the final phase brings together movements that specialists consider “perfect”.

Federer remained unscathed and healthy in a sport that left and leaves the players who play it battered. The simplicity, efficiency and elegance of their strokes and movements that are shown by coaches and scientists as an example is not only an aesthetic issue: over time it became, above all, a health issue. The method to survive and endure in a chronically injured environment: Federer retires at the age of 41, ten years older than one of his contemporary rivals, Andy Murray, who retired at 31. The Swiss was always bigger than the Spaniard Rafael Nadal and Serbian Novak Djokovic; however, he never felt that age difference. Baricco already wrote it, and it is necessary to read it again to remember where we were when Federer made history. “The fundamental difference between Federer and the other tennis players on the planet is not the one that is most obvious, that is, the fact that, in the long run, it is he who wins. That is a corollary, perhaps a coincidence, often a logical consequence. The real difference between him and the others, as everyone knows, is that the others play tennis, while he does something that has more to do with breathing, or with the flight of migratory birds, or with strength. renewed from the wind in the morning”.