January 8, 2024, 6:07 a.m.
Rafael Nadal is in a trap that is easy to get out of. But not really, it’s actually extremely difficult to do it, because Nadal is a prisoner of a tie between three forces that rule his being, his heart and his tennis player’s armor..
Tennis tells you that you are in a position to continue playing and winning.
The body tells him that it is time to retire, that he can’t take it anymore.
It must unravel the mind, which throughout his entire career was Nadal’s great differential, the engine of his ambition, his tenacity and his victories. And his common sense.
What will the mind pay attention to? To the evidence of a physicist who betrays him with increasing frequency or to the heart and soul of a champion?
The mind is working, but apparently not ready to decide yet. It is enough to read Nadal’s posts on the social network. It’s like he’s trying to convince himself that not playing the Australian Open is a minor matter..
And the truth is that it is not, Australia was a great target. It wasn’t about winning the tournament, of course not, but about returning to it and playing in it. It was about competing, which is what Nadal is obsessed with. You need to compete, because if not, winning will be impossible. It was about, neither more nor less, than playing tennis, being a tennis player..
Thus, Nadal is in a very complex situation: he is not competitive because he does not compete. And he doesn’t compete because his physique today tells him that enough is enough, that he’s done. YesYour body, and it is an enormous paradox, is preventing you from being a tennis player.
“Rafael will exhaust his possibilities because “He loves tennis much more for everything it gives him than for everything it takes away,” said Toni Nadal, his uncle and coach for many years, in a column in El País.
But at 37 and a half years old the end is near. “This time the situation is much more complicated and it will probably be the last time we see him return after his body has forced him to temporarily retire. The reasons are very clear. In previous returns, he had to compete with tennis players of his own generation, while today his rivals are much younger and developing a new type of tennis in which one of the most determining characteristics is the desire to hit the ball increasingly faster.
There remains one last bet, which is the great objective that the Spaniard had set: to be in shape and be competitive in the clay season, the key to his career, the weeks that made Nadal a legend. Without those triumphs and that blind confidence achieved on clay, Nadal would not have extended his dominance to other surfaces and tournaments for two decades.
And before the orange spring in Europe appears the faint hope of the ATP 250 in Buenos Aires and 500 in Rio de Janeiro, two tournaments that Nadal won at the time. Playing in South America to gain matches and confidence for Europe and Roland Garros was a good recipe after other long breaks.
In one of the two tournaments they acknowledge to CLAY that the hope of having Nadal is real, although doubt predominates: “He will be without playing for several weeks, we don’t know if he would make it to the South American tour.” Buenos Aires is played between February 12 and 18, while Rio takes place the following week, from the 19th to the 25th.
Juan Mónaco, a close friend of Nadal, already told CLAY: “He returns to the circuit to win. If not, he doesn’t return.”
A year ago, after the injury at the Australian Open, Nadal’s technical group talked about a four-week break and then resuming the circuit. The four weeks turned into 50, in 11 months.
“See you soon,” Nadal said in the message in “X” in which he resigns from Australia. Never has such a seemingly banal phrase meant so much.
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. …
2024-01-08 05:07:49
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