Paris, June 4, 2023. Sunday night, Carlos Alcaraz has dinner with his closest circle. Family, coaching staff and little else.
His performance at Roland Garros was spectacular, but the rest of the table looked at him strangely: the Spaniard was not happy.
“What I said was not what I meant,” he argued..
What was Alcaraz talking about? What had that twenty-year-old prodigy who arrived in Paris as number one in the world and with the aura of a favorite not meant to say? How could he be restless, if life smiled at him?
That edition of the French Open was special, because Rafael Nadal was missing. The fourteen-time tournament champion had announced weeks before, during a disturbing press conference in Manacor, that he was putting a “full stop” in his career. He would dedicate himself to conditioning his body, his physique. He wanted to concentrate on fixing what needed to be fixed—whatever could be fixed, if it could be fixed—in that armor that was his greatest ally and, at the same time, his great traitor.
It is explained by Toni Nadal, his uncle and coach from childhood until 2016: since he began competing at the high level, in 2003, until the end of 2023, Nadal missed sixteen Grand Slam tournaments due to injuries. In twenty-one years he went five without playing. And yet, he competes for the title of most successful player of all time.
Tennis had been wondering for years about what would come after the “Big Three”, the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic trilogy. The three shaped a unique, unrepeatable era of tennis, but as often happens, When something lasts a long time, no matter if it is sublime, many ask themselves: “What now, who is coming next?”
The answer was clear in that June 2023: Now Alcaraz, the next one is Alcaraz, champion of the US Open 2022 at nineteen years old and Wimbledon 2023 at age 20. The youngest world number one in history since the ATP began publishing its world ranking in 1973. The first teenager in history to close a season as number one.
Of Nadal, at that Roland Garros, the memory remained, his statue next to the stadium and an uncomfortable, almost distressing question: what if he never returned, and if everything was over?
In that context of effervescence for the new kid on the block and anticipated nostalgia for the possibility that Paris would no longer see its overwhelming champion, the symbolic succession from Nadal to Alcaraz accelerated.
A French journalist asked Alcaraz, in Spanish, if he believed that Nadal’s fans, orphaned in 2023 in Paris, now supported him. AND Alcaraz, a bold twenty-something, answered yes, he trusted that those fans were now on his side.
The simple question had given way to a complicated answer. Was Alcaraz perhaps establishing himself as the successor to a player who had not yet retired, as the new power instead of the best athlete in the history of Spain?
Of course not, but instead of answering that you can’t say something like that, since no one will ever match what Nadal did in Paris and that his plan was to return to compete and win, Alcaraz responded that yes, he expected that transfer of fans. .
The author
Sebastián Fest (Buenos Aires, 1971) fell in love with journalism covering sports. And he is still in love. Former head of Sports at DPA and “La Nación”, he covered all the soccer World Cups and all the Olympic Games since 1996, in addition to more than 60 Grand Slams. Author of ‘Neither king nor god’ and ‘Messiánico’, biographies of Messi, and of ‘Sin red’, a journey of more than a decade around the world following Federer and Nadal. Founder of CLAY, he was also Editor-in-Chief of the site Around the Rings.
That’s why Alcaraz was worried that Sunday, a starry spring night in Paris.
“He didn’t mean in any way that he would take away Nadal’s fans. But He got confused in the answer, he realized it right away,” explained a member of his entourage.
That Nadal’s name came up in almost every Alcaraz contact with the press was natural. The story was too good, almost unreal. Eighteen years after Nadal’s explosive appearance in the 2005 season, another Spaniard, also dark, also amazingly intense and talented, shook tennis. How not to compare them?
There was also a consensus in the world of this sport: Alcaraz included in his game a distillation of the best of Nadal, Federer and Djokovic. Many said it, including Juan Carlos Ferrero, coach of Alcaraz, in an interview with the CLAY site: “At a competitive level, Carlos is very good, at the hitting level he has that aggressiveness of Djokovic, that climbing to the net of Roger and the mentality, obviously, of Rafa. If you want to compare them with the three, I would go there.”
Alcaraz sees it somewhat differently. In those days of Parisian 2023, the author of this book asked him the question: “Many people see shots from Nadal, Federer and Djokovic in your game, do you agree?”
The question was unsuccessful, it was not about blows, but about imprint, attitudes and qualities: what Ferrero said, competitiveness, offensive aggressiveness, mental strength. And Alcaraz, who at twenty years old had all the ambition in the world and was not at all interested in hiding it, responded logically: “They say I have shots from Nadal, Federer and Djokovic, because that is what people have been used to seeing for twenty years. But I do not define myself, I have not sought to be like anyone else. I like to think that it is one hundred percent me, and not the copy of any other player’s shots“.
Alcaraz is right, he is not anyone’s copy. And that is as true as that “people have been used to seeing for twenty years” Nadal, Federer and Djokovic. The people… and him.
Before Nadal burst into the foreground of tennis, no player—at least not a great player—jumped like a man possessed in the entrance tunnel to the courts or in the net against his rival. at the time of the draw. The photos from Roland Garros 2023 show Alcaraz doing exactly what Nadal did throughout his career: jumping, releasing the tension in front of his rivals, giving them a good bath of intimidation in the process.
Alcaraz does that because Nadal did it. He grew up watching it on television and incorporated it as something natural.
Alcaraz would not be what it is if Nadal had not existed. Toni Nadal explains it very well.
—If there had not been a Nadal, would an Alcaraz in Spain have been possible?
—Yes, of course, because a player like him is born through spontaneous generation. And everything, obviously, always follows a chain. At the end of life, what do you do? TOlcaraz hits him harder than Rafael. And Rafael hit him harder than Bruguera. The two played with spin, Rafael did the same, but stronger. You always start from where the other has arrived. When we arrived at the circuit and wanted to win on dirt, we had to beat Coria, Ferrero and Moyá. It is the law of life, He who comes later always has to overcome. Whoever wants to surpass Usain Bolt knows that he has to run 9.50, and that anything else will not be enough.
—What about Nadal, Federer and Djokovic in the Alcaraz game?
—I think Alcaraz is more similar to Rafael than Djokovic, who plays with less intensity than Rafael. Alcaraz plays with high intensity. Djokovic plays with great calm, without giving up, like Murray.
—And what do you see about Federer?
—Maybe offensive ambition. Alcaraz is very fast and has the ability to finish the point quickly. I think Federer hit him much more elegantly, Federer hit him much more elegantly than anyone else.
Antonio Martínez Cascales, the man who took Ferrero to number one and who acts as Alcaraz’s “coach of the coach”, whom he accompanies around the world in some tournaments, sees things very similar to Toni Nadal.
“Carlos above all has ways of playing, more than strokes, of Nadal, Federer and Djokovic. Nadal’s tenacity, Federer’s quick transition and talented shots, Djokovic’s elasticity“.
And, yes, it is true that in the young Alcaraz there are traces of the young Nadal. “It is true that one sees and copies the best. It is true that he jumps in the tunnel and in the net the way Nadal jumped, something that no one did.”
There is, however, something in which the king and the prince, the consecrated man and his successor, are very different. Throughout his career, Nadal displayed a modesty that sometimes bordered on exasperation. A modesty that rested on what Uncle Toni’s Prussian education had engraved in his mind: respect, you must always respect others. Feeling like a winner ahead of time is, in the eyes of the Nadals, a lack of respect for their rival. And setting exaggerated goals in public as well. Although he is intimately convinced that they can be achieved.
That was the “Nadal method.” The “Alcaraz method” is radically different.
In December 2020, Alcaraz was number 141 in the world ranking and, in an interview with Cadena SER, he talked about his next steps in tennis: being number one in the world.
Two years later, that bet was already insufficient. “I’ve been lucky to achieve my dreams very early, to be number one in the world, to win a Grand Slam.”
At that point it was already clear that Alcaraz does not dream, that Alcaraz would not “like” anything, Alcaraz does not offer him any room for doubt: he proposes and is willing. And he announces it beforehand, almost always with that ear-to-ear smile that he generously shows at press conferences and in many moments of games in which he is seen enjoying himself. Did Nadal smile on the courts? Very little, very little. His was always a frown and competitive tension. If Nadal activated from the shell, Alcaraz did it from the smile.
What did Alcaraz aspire to then, two years after setting and achieving goals unattainable for almost any mortal? “Right now my dream in tennis is to be one of the best in history, as I have already repeated many times. It is possible that I am too ambitious, too big, but in this world you have to always dream big, always think big, set high-end goals. Absolutely unthinkable in Nadal. Talk of “dreaming big” and “high-end goals” is as far from him as the possibility of joining the Communist Party..
Nadal, in his first Roland Garros, that of 2005, took the title. He was nineteen years old. Alcaraz, in his first Roland Garros, in 2021, at eighteen years old, lost in the third round. He didn’t win it in 2022 or 2023 either.
There are similarities, of course. And many differences.
Because Alcaraz is Alcaraz. And Nadal is Nadal.
Buenos Aires, 1971. Although outside of sports topics he has an intense journalistic life, Sebastián Fest fell in love with journalism covering sports. And he is still in love. Former head of Sports for the German agency DPA and the Argentine newspaper “La Nación”, he covered all the soccer World Cups since 1998 and all the Olympic Games since 1996, in addition to more than 60 Grand Slam tournaments in tennis. Author of ‘Neither king nor god’ and ‘Messiánico’, biographies of Lionel Messi, and of ‘Sin red’, a journey of more than a decade around the world following Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. He was co-president of the International Tennis Journalists Association (ITWA), which brings together the one hundred most influential journalists in the world. Founder of CLAY (claytenis.com), a site in English and Spanish specialized in tennis and with global reach, he was also Chief Editor of the site Around the Rings, specialized in high sports politics. In addition to Spanish, he is fluent in German, English and Portuguese reasonably well. …
Rafael Nadal Carlos Alcaraz
2023-11-21 11:03:37
#didnt #wanted #Relief
