Rafa Nadal announces his retirement | Tennis | Sports

Rafa Nadal retires. The Spanish tennis player announced his retirement this Thursday with a video broadcast on social networks. “I am retiring from professional tennis. Thank you all so much,” he says. His last matches will be with the Spanish Davis Cup team next November. To be or not to be, that is the question. And for some time, a year and a half now, Rafael Nadal had begun to feel (and accept) that he was no longer a tennis player. Not how he understands it. The Mallorcan intended to stretch the route so he could say goodbye in his own way, competing on the tracks where he has provided so many moments of glory, but fate reserved the same outcome for him as for so many others: denial. The physique, the happy injuries; final point of so many figures. Let them tell their partner Roger Federer, without going any further. His goodbye now arrives, forced by the episode he experienced at the beginning of 2023 in Melbourne; From there, from that tendon rupture, an abrupt disappearance from the foreground and one attempt after another to reconnect, going through the unpleasant experience of the operating room. Exhausted and close to forty, 38 years on his DNI – considerably more on his damaged body – the Mallorcan decides to finally hang up his racket and announces it. Tennis, then, already has him as another one of the great legends of its iconography.

Time can handle everything, even Nadal’s immense irreducibility. This Thursday, October 10, the news is confirmed through the mouth of the protagonist, which at the beginning of his career was anticipated early and which later, as the years progressed and the tennis player overcame endless adversities, it became difficult to imagine. After 23 years in the elite and after a lifetime wielding the racket, the granite champion, the boy whom all of Spain saw grow and succeed – whether he liked tennis or not -, permanently retires from the courts as a result of pain. He and his body, an all or nothing relationship; heaven and hell, few middle ground. A last year and a half full of disappointments has led to a decision that he, resilient like few others, has tried to delay. The Balearic Islands have been stirred up to their last professional death throes, but nature definitively cuts off credit and the Serbian Novak Djokovic remains the last vestige of an extraordinary era.

Nadal wanted to continue, to continue enjoying the day-to-day life and the adrenaline of the competition, but his physique no longer responded and his mind ended up giving in to erosion. Thus comes to an end a journey as spectacular as it is exemplary, filled with great successes and an exemplary procedure. He now transcends as one of the most recognizable symbols of sport, capable of surpassing himself a thousand times, no matter how much his muscles break; again and again he got up, but the law of logic definitely asks him to stop. At 38 years old, universally elevated and already a father of a family, the Spaniard looks towards that tomorrow that he began to glimpse two years ago, when his left foot – Müller-Weiss syndrome, chronic involvement – already led him towards the thought of fighting in withdrawal.

That foot stumbled him from the beginning. Always threatening, the scaphoid disease did not manage to knock him down, but the daily routine of recent times has not been as expected and guides him towards that second life of athletes. Too many days of threats, frustrated attempts, back and forth without being able to train as he considered he should. Consequently, goodbye arrives and tennis, the sport in its entirety, bows before one of the great wonders, recognizable by his granite mind and his very powerful drive, probably one of the most damaging blows in history. Nadal wanted more, but this time he found no escape. Saying goodbye is more than difficult, since it does not respond to a question of level or competitiveness, but exclusively to inertia. He fought until the last ball.

“They have been difficult years, these last two especially. I have not been able to play without limitations. This is a difficult decision, which has taken me time to make, but in this life everything has a beginning and an end. “I think it is the right time to put an end to a long and much more successful career than I could have ever imagined,” Nadal explained in that video. “I am very excited that my last tournament is the Davis Cup final and representing my country. It is closing the circle, since one of my first joys as a professional tennis player was the final in Seville, in 2004. I feel super lucky for all the things I have been able to experience,” he adds.

Nadal leaves as the Lord of the Earth, undeniable dominator of the most strategic surface, with 92 titles in his bag – 14 at Roland Garros and a total of 63 on clay – and with the seal of the fiercest competitor, capable of assaulting the reign of Federer and resisting the melee with Djokovic. He knew how to adapt to modern vertigo and perpetuate himself. The form changed, but not the substance. Starting in his thirties, there was no long hair or pirate pants, but the spirit was the same as that boy who woke up at seven in the morning and went with his uncle Toni to the Manacor Tennis Club, in search of that 0.1% extra; right-handed, but ended up playing left-handed; with character, but always receptive; as feisty as he is disciplined, passionate, educated and to a certain extent paradoxical, because as a teenager he dreamed of the green temple of London and ended up taking over the reddish sanctuary in Paris, where the organization has been paying tribute to him for three years with an 800 kilo sculpture and three meters high.

There is, in any case, no measure or volume to size a winner molded from the overwhelming logic of his coach: ball by ball, point by point. Never beyond. Originally an Earthling – he won his first Roland Garros at the age of 19, in 2005 – he quickly emerged as a hungry chameleon. He defeated Federer in the final of the finals, surely, that wonderful confrontation at the All England Club (2008) about which so much literature has been made, and a year later, 2009, he assaulted the cement empire of the Anglo-Saxons, with the Swiss among tears that night in Melbourne: “God, this is killing me…”. He continued and in the next exercise he also took over New York, firmly determined to run for the great historical throne, but at the same time finding himself with the thorns scattered in the layout of his own physique – knees, back, wrist, appendage… – and falling in his thirties in unknown territory: that of doubt. He was trapped by anxiety for a year, but he escaped and remade himself while continuing to evolve, becoming more and more complete.

Toni aside, and starting in 2018 under the sole tutelage of Carlos Moyà, idol, friend and confidant, he reinvented his tennis in his thirties to save mileage and survive times in which thinking too much is penalized. New stage, new profile; less running, reducing time on the court and promoting more direct play; that is, Nadal in version flash. This is how he managed to triumph for the fourth time in the US Open, after one of the harshest finals he has ever played, against the Russian Daniil Medvedev, and thus he once again performed against the Moscow player in the unlikely Australian outcome of 2022, when artificial intelligence granted him a minimum margin for recovery. In that episode, 5h 24m thrillerthe Mallorcan definitely became eternal. “It is my most unexpected triumph,” he said, placed for the first time ahead of Federer and Djokovic in the great historical fight.

This Thursday, Nadal remembered his family, his father, Sebastián, his uncle Toni, his wife, Mery… And he thanked precisely “the entire tennis industry” and his teammates for those moments that, he says, he will remember throughout his life. his life. Explicit references to the trio that conquered tennis in the last 20 years. The Serbian (24 majors) is finally the winner of the great race, but he (22) leaves him with an exclusive distinction and the Swiss (20) applauds from the mountains: Nadal, the flesh and blood hero who always surpassed himself and which, above all, crossed the emotional border of the titles.

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