Paris (dpa)
On September 24, 2022, a wave of sadness swept social media after the famous photo of the duo of tennis legends, Swiss Roger Federer and Spanish Rafael Nadal, crying next to each other in the last meeting that Federer played before his retirement.
This competition has existed between the two parties for many years, and both have become role models for all tennis stars in the world, not only tennis, but also for other sports. It is a competition like the one between the Argentine star Lionel Messi and the Portuguese Cristiano Ronaldo in football, a competition based on… Love and mutual respect between two of the greatest legends in the history of the game.
Two years after Federer’s retirement, the matter has not yet reached the end for Nadal, who is competing in the men’s singles tournament in the French Open tennis tournament “Roland Garros”, which is likely to be the last tournament in his career, after years of giving.
Despite ranking 276th in the world in the men’s rankings, Nadal remains an important name in the world of tennis, and always remains a candidate to win tournaments, even as he approaches his 38th year on June 3.
The beginning of Nadal’s story with the Grand Slam tournaments was in 2002, when he reached the semi-finals of the Wimbledon Youth Championship, and after that he became the youngest player to reach the third round of the adult tournament the following year, as he was only 17 years old.
In 2005, Nadal won his first title in the French Open, Roland Garros, when he was 19 years old, becoming the youngest player in history to win a Grand Slam title, and with that begins a story whose end has not yet been written. It is the story of his love of championships and chasing numbers, as he monopolized the title of “Roland Garros” between 2005 and 2008, before Roger Federer ended his monopoly in 2009, but he returned again to win the title the following year, and continued to win the tournament held on clay courts. Until 2014, then another period of monopoly followed between 2017 and 2020.
After the spread of the Corona pandemic, Nadal won the “Roland Garros” title only once in 2022, the same year that witnessed his crowning another “Grand Slam” tournament, represented by the Australian Open Tennis Championship.
The first time Nadal won the Australian Open tennis title was in 2009, and he waited another 13 years to win the second title.
At Wimbledon, Nadal won the title twice, the first in 2008 and the second in 2010. He also won the US Open Tennis Championship four times in 2010, 2013, 2017 and 2019. Nadal was born in 1986 in the Spanish city of Mallorca. His father is a businessman, while his uncle, Tony Nadal, was a former tennis player, and his other uncle, Miguel Angel Nadal, was a football player, having previously played for Real Mallorca and Barcelona in the 1990s. Nadal may be in his final year on the tennis court, but the Roland Garros tournament, his first love, which earned him the title of King of Clay Courts, will be a wonderful reward for the end of a great career for a great star whose name is immortalized in golden letters in the world of tennis.
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