On May 12, after two hours and 39 minutes of battle against his body, in the round of 16 match of the Rome Masters 1,000 that he lost to Denis Shapovalov, A “it seems that you are injured” from a reporter at a press conference unleashed a flow that Rafael Nadal had never opened in his almost 36 years of life.
“I haven’t been injured. I am a player who lives with an injury” It was the first drop that drove the current. The rest flowed with their own strength: “The pain is permanent. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Today has been crazy”, “I play because it makes me happy, but the pain takes away that happiness”, “I live taking a lot of painkillers to be able to train every day, but one cannot continue like this for a long time”, “the pain takes away happiness, and not just to play, but to live”, “there will come a day when my head will say ‘enough’”. In the end, when Nadal’s face could not bear another gesture of impotence, the water stopped and his blood began to flow: “I am not going to stop believing or fighting to create opportunities for myself at Roland Garros. I will not fail in that.”
This Sunday, against the Australian Jordan Thompson, a new path for the Spanish tennis player begins in the Parisian tournament that he has won 13 times. And with him, the beginning of another chapter in the cycle of revivals that has marked his sporting career.
Being a champion for and despite the body
Rafael Nadal has 20 years of professional career and a lifetime dedicated to tennis.
Rafael Nadal’s career, today the most successful tennis player in grand slams (21), has been marked by his physique. First, because without the strength of his muscles he would not be the great reference of the game from the baseline nor the man with the undeniable blows who has won 91 titles in his individual career. Second, because although his substance seems to be taken from a mythological hero, it has been precisely his body that has reminded him of the limits of his humanity with the more than 22 injuries of all kinds that have sidelined him from the courts for almost 1,300 days. A paradoxical relationship that had its most revealing point in that press conference in Italy and that, ultimately, is summed up in one of his most accurate nicknames: the ‘Gladiator’.
Nadal’s first injury occurred in 2003, when he had not even completed a year on the ATP circuit. At that time he had a fracture in his right elbow, but the following year, during his only participation in the tournament in Estoril (Portugal), the fracture in the scaphoid of his left foot marked the point of no return. From the moment that key bone for the biomechanics of the limb was broken, the current fifth best tennis player in the world assumed his true destiny: to fight against his own limits. The crudest summary speaks of the fact that in the last 19 years there have only been two seasons in which Nadal did not suffer any major injury: 2015 and 2020.
The first of them was the only one in which he did not lift the trophy of a Masters 1,000 or a ‘grand slam’. “This year my injury has been mental,” he commented at the end of 2015, rightly arguing that, with the sea of injuries, “security is lost, one demands more of oneself and things are complicated.” In the second, the year of the covid-19 outbreak, he did the same as the rest of the population: survive. Faced with a planet that seemed to stop, Nadal’s reflections could not go anywhere other than the estimation of life. “In the end, we only value how well we are healthy when we are sick,” he told ‘El País’ that year, referring to the beginning of the pandemic, but being able to have done so quietly about his life, because perhaps there is no one who appreciates more moments without suffering than him.
The family of the man from the Balearic Islands estimates that since that rupture of the scaphoid in Portugal, Rafa began to suffer the effects of Müller-Weiss syndrome, a strange condition without remedy that causes his left foot to generate “permanent pain” as a result of an alteration in the tarsus. For that perennial companion, who although he does not finish winning the battle does not stop weighing him down, Nadal must reinvent himself from time to time. And in those cycles of rebirth, clay is presented as the most fertile ground.
I have not been injured. I am a player who lives with an injury.
Rafael Nadal
The promised land
In the tennis vade mecum it appears that Rafael Nadal is the king of brick dust. A technical vision would say that on clay his movements, supports and slides favor him because they are less aggressive. A practical view would say that the Spaniard has imposed his monarchy with 62 titles in the arena. The 13 most important of them, in the tournament in which he will debut tomorrow and in which he enjoys being the most successful of his 131 years of existence: Roland Garros.
In 2003 and 2004, injuries prevented Nadal from participating in the great French tournament. But since 2005 he has not missed it even once. For this reason, this year, when he arrives with perhaps the most worrying records (five games and no title on the surface, in addition to spending six weeks out due to a broken rib), the atmosphere for the public is full of doubts. For him, not much, because although some emphasize the risk of sharing the top of the table with Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz, two of the favorites to win the title, in the case of Rafael Nadal the pulse is the same as always: pain or glory It is already clear which he has won more times.
ANDRES FELIPE BALAGUERA SARMIENTO
SPORTS WEATHER
Networking: @balagueraaa
More news
‘Juan Pablo Montoya has everything to win more titles’: Mario Andretti
The incredible soccer priest who performed a miracle in the Copa Libertadores
Dayana Yastremska: the Ukrainian tennis player who escaped from the war and arrived in Bogotá
#Rafael #Nadal #gladiator #defeated #body