While I was waiting for the start of the Spain-Canada match, I was thinking about the doubts that Rafa Nadal has about his immediate future and that have been with him for some time now. I imagine Rafa right now on his huge boat in Manacor, looking at the horizon with a racket in his hand in a wonderful Mediterranean sunset and asking himself: should I retire or not? That is the question. In this regard, a Twitter user reminded me of a text written on the famous blog El Palomero, a literary masterpiece that has been resting for a few years in the blog cemetery. It was titled On Retirement, so as to leave no doubts about what it was going to be about. I recommend that you read it in its entirety, but with so much going on these days, I will give you a summary.
“In the life of an athlete, there is something that no matter how much you prepare, imagine it, or are told about it, you are almost never sufficiently prepared for. One fine morning, you wake up and there is no training or competition on the horizon. The phone no longer rings as much and journalists do not interview you. Even cases of social references are affected by a rapid decrease in attention and demand. We live in a society with less and less memory, where the present, the useful, the new, takes on greater relevance to the detriment of the past, the unproductive, the already seen. Retirement, which is still a loss of something very dear, requires adequate mental management that should begin while you are active. The early age at which you must face this retirement, the universe not completely connected with the normality in which we lived until that day, the lack of awareness of sports mortality or management within a society that is increasingly of the Kleenex type (use and throw away) can be some of the obstacles that must be overcome.”
For those who think that he should have hung up his racket a long time ago, I turn to an earlier reference, precisely a friend of Nadal: Pau Gasol. After a career as prodigious as it was long, his physical condition began to fail. Approaching 40 and for more than two years it was all bad news, relapses, frustrated attempts to return to the court. It seemed like an unhealthy obsession. What need? we asked ourselves. And when it seemed impossible, he began to improve, to run, to train and finally to compete. He did it with dignity, helped Barça win the league and said goodbye to the world by competing in his fifth Olympics.
I think Rafa has achieved the same thing as Pau. Being able to say goodbye in action, dressed in shorts, sweating profusely and giving it his all. These games have opened the door for the exit operation. He closed his history of duels with Djokovic, competed with his usual ferocity, enjoyed doubles and passed the baton by hugging his unquestionable successor Alcaraz. All of this on his favourite court and city. Surely it was not his dream farewell to fall in the quarterfinals, but the alternatives for the future do not seem better. Unless he thinks he can still reach the necessary competitiveness again. So far, reality has denied him.
The moment of farewell has already arrived without fail for Rudy Fernández. He is surely now extremely angry for leaving these games so soon, for having come so close, because if they had competed against Australia as they did against Canada, things would have been different. But neither his career nor the way it ended is anything but. Quite the contrary. Spain’s behaviour was very Rudy-like. Against a more powerful Canada, especially physically, Scariolo’s men persisted, fought, did not give up and left their last breath on the court.
Tomorrow there will be time to reflect on the present and future of our team. It is time to bid farewell with all honours to a tremendous player with a colossal record of service, wishing him that the always complicated adjustment to civilian life is as satisfactory as possible. What I am sure of is that his body will thank him for it. We are doing it now.
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