It’s always been Rafa Nadal for me.
Despite the years of people fawning over Roger Federer with his smooth playing style and his seemingly effortless ease of racking up grand slam titles, I always preferred Nadal.
The Spaniard couldn’t have been more different to Federer; every shot Nadal hit and every step Nadal took appeared to be given his maximum effort.
For every match Federer completed having never broken sweat, Nadal was typically drenched by the first changeover.
When Federer retired in 2022, I was sad, but knowing Nadal is about to hang up his racquet feels like a much greater loss to me.
On Tuesday, the Davis Cup Finals will begin, with the event in Malaga Nadal’s last-ever competitive appearance.
It comes over two decades after the Spaniard’s first professional match and will conclude a career that has seen the 38-year-old amass some quite remarkable statistics.
Nadal has spent 209 weeks at world number one, won 92 career titles including 22 grand slams, claimed Olympic gold, racked up an incredible 912 consecutive weeks in the world’s top ten (it stretched from 2005 until 2023) but perhaps his most remarkable achievement is his 14 French Open titles.
For me, that record at Roland Garros is not only one of the greatest records in tennis, it’s one of the greatest records in all of sport.
To be quite so dominant across such a timescale – Nadal won his first French Open title in 2005 and his last in 2022 – is astonishing.
Nadal is, in my estimation, the greatest competitor sport has ever seen.
The real secret to succeeding in elite sport is to be able to live in the moment, and remain unaffected by what’s come before or coming after. Almost no athlete can actually do that consistently. But Nadal could.
The Mallorcan played every single point like it was his last. It was like his life depended on every rally. There’s no other player in tennis who has ever competed the way Nadal competed over his career.
Mentally, he’s the strongest there’s ever been.
Of all the greats, Nadal was the one who, whatever the score, you could never, ever count out.
Even in training, his attitude was the same; hit every ball like it was a matter life or death.
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Indeed, it’s this attitude that’s probably hampered his career more than anything else; his overtly physical style of play no doubt contributed to the injury list that’s accumulated over the years. It’s an injury list that’s far lengthier with which neither of his two greatest rivals, Federer or Novak Djokovic, had to contend.
What was also so likeable about Nadal was that he didn’t, and doesn’t, seem to care about records.
While Federer was blazing the trail when it came to racking up 20 grand slam titles and Djokovic seemed laser-focused on becoming the “greatest-ever” on paper, Nadal has always seemed astonishingly unbothered by how many titles he has or whether he’s definitively classed as the greatest of all time or not.
And he was famously just a good guy. At the end of tournaments, he’d personally thank everyone from the line-judges to the drivers to the stenographers. And he’d do it without fanfare – it wasn’t to be “seen” to be a good guy, it was because he genuinely is a good guy. Make no mistake, egoless personalities like Nadal’s are vanishingly rare in the upper echelons of elite sport.
What will be fascinating to observe will be how Nadal’s retirement will affect the final active member of the big four, Djokovic.
With Federer, Andy Murray and Nadal gone, the Serb will be the last man standing and he’s already admitted that with the departure of each of his greatest rivals, something inside him has left too.
It’s inevitable that Djokovic has been affected by the retirement of the men with whom he fought consistently for major titles with for nearly twenty years.
Indeed, it’s my guess is that next season will be Djokovic’s last.
But over the next week, all eyes will, quite rightly, be on Nadal.
A fifth Davis Cup title this weekend, on home soil, would be a fitting end to the Spaniard’s career, although in reality it will mean little in the grand scheme of how he will be remembered.
Nadal may not have the most grand slam titles to his name – both Djokovic and Serena Williams have more – but it’s impossible to believe anyone will ever be more dominant at a major tournament than Nadal was at the French Open. His name is likely to live forever in the record books at Roland Garros for his 14 titles – it’s impossible to imagine anyone will ever get close to 14 grand slam titles at one tournament never mind surpass it.
More than anything, though, I’ll miss Nadal’s unparalleled ability to put every sinew of effort into every single shot he hit and step he took.
We’ll never, I believe, see an athlete who’s able to compete like he has ever again.
Nadal will leave a lasting legacy, and his reputation as the greatest competitor sport has ever seen is surely one that any athlete would be happy with.
