The best tennis players — even competing on their favourite surface — generally have at least one humiliation they’d prefer to forget.
For Roger Federer, eight times a Wimbledon champion, it was losing in the second round at SW19 to the then-world No 116 Sergiy Stakhovsky in 2013. Eleven years earlier, seven-time Wimbledon champion Pete Sampras went out at the same stage to lucky loser George Bastl, the world No 145. Novak Djokovic’s worst moment also came at his best tournament, losing to the world No 117 Denis Istomin in 2017 at the Australian Open — the event he has won 10 times.
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The exception to this rule is Rafael Nadal.
At the French Open, where he is a 14-time champion, Nadal has only been beaten by two players. One is Djokovic, statistically the best male player of all time. The other is Robin Soderling. The Soderling defeat is the closest Nadal has had to his “Bastl moment” at Roland Garros, but it was still a last-16 match — and the opponent was not a nobody. Soderling was the 23rd seed, and he would ultimately become a top-four player and two-time French Open finalist.
This was a different kind of upset, and overall Nadal’s near-unblemished, 112-3 record in Paris feels sacred, one he doesn’t want desecrated with an unedifying defeat to an unfancied player.
All of this must factor into Nadal’s thinking, as he conducts a knife-edge will-he-won’t-he dance before the 2024 tournament.
Monday, April 15 he confirmed that the ATP 500 tournament in Barcelona would mark his return from the hip and abdominal injuries that have kept him out since January, in Brisbane, in what was his first event for almost a year. His first match, on Tuesday, April 16 against Italian and world No 62 Flavio Cobolli, ended in a relatively comfortable 6-2, 6-3, composed of a few flashes of the Nadal that lost won a match on clay — nearly 2 years ago, at the 2022 French Open — and a barrage of nervous unforced errors from his opponent.
Speaking in a press conference prior to the event, he was cautiously upbeat. “I decided to come here at the last minute, but the week has been positive.”
“The question is, can I or can’t I? I’m coming off two difficult years — my body hasn’t let me keep up with the calendar.”
“I don’t know what may happen in the future, but I am treating this as my last appearance in el Godó (the Barcelona Open.) I don’t want to stop being competitive. There have been very hard days, physically and mentally, but the good days are making up for it,” he said.
Nadal is desperate to get fit again, having appealed to his fans that “you have no idea how hard this is for me to not be able to play these events” after pulling out of Monte Carlo. He needs matches, not just for fitness but for momentum as well, to build up the muscle memory and match practice that even veterans of his talent need come Grand Slam time.
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There is a but. Matches mean risking injury and risking injury means risking Roland Garros.
He does not want to do any of this without feeling confident that he will not be exposed to the kind of humiliating defeat mentioned above. As Nadal’s near-contemporary Andy Murray has said, it’s about competing, not just playing. Murray, too, has spent much of the year making difficult decisions about how much more punishment he can take — physically and mentally, as injuries recur and defeats against players he remembers sweeping aside mount.
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In this context, it’s understandable that Nadal is putting an enormous amount of thought into every decision he takes during a clay season where he remains the main talking point without even playing. His statements have the air of someone saying they might come to the party you’re asking them about, but they can’t commit yet.
The build-up to this Barcelona decision was carefully managed.
“First training… I am excited to be here for a few days before the start of the tournament,” Nadal said upon arriving in the city. “I’m here to see how it goes, with the desire to try to play. I’ll let you know. It’s important to say that I don’t want to confirm I’ll be playing, but I hope so. We’ll see.”
On Friday, April 12, he added in another post: “Barcelona, today, Thursday. Training #2. Step by step.” In another, simply the word “Barcelona” with a smiling face, accompanied by him sitting on a bench.
Open training sessions have been stage-managed, with Nadal smacking away groundstrokes under the watchful eye of supporters and media, but not serving or moving laterally in the explosive way for which he is renowned — the areas of his game said to be most affected by his injury. Toni Nadal last week told Spanish newspaper Marca that he has pain when serving, but no other problem. A 6-1 practice set defeat of world No 6 Andrey Rublev on Saturday, April 13 was the most encouraging sign in his game since his last competitive appearance on court in Brisbane in January; an abbreviated serve motion, designed to reduce stress on his lower body, less so.
When he took to the court on Tuesday, all eyes were on his form — and it held, even though his serve at times looked stunted, with speeds frequently down in the low 100s for miles-per-hour on his first.
Nadal is not being precious. He has suffered many big upsets over his career — they’ve just never happened on clay.
For a time, humiliating defeats at Wimbledon were a near-annual occurrence.
World No 100 Lukas Rosol in 2012. World No 135 Steve Darcis in 2013. World No 144 and 19-year-old Nick Kyrgios in 2014. World No 102 Dustin Brown in 2015.
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These were all extremely painful losses for Nadal to take, chipping away at his aura of invincibility and ultimately led to the worst two seasons of his career, in 2015 and 2016. Similar defeats in the next few weeks wouldn’t have that knock-on effect. This is expected to be Nadal’s last year on tour, whether he plays at Roland Garros or not.
The timing still matters because, in recent years, Nadal has seen his peers suffer at a similar point in their careers to the one he arrives at now.
Serena Williams’ penultimate Wimbledon appearance saw her forced to pull out with injury six games into her first-round match against Aliaksandra Sasnovich in 2021. That same tournament saw Federer play the final singles match of his career, one that took in the only set he has ever lost to love at Wimbledon. He later said of the 6-3, 7-6, 6-0 quarter-final defeat to Hubert Hurkacz: “The end of that match was one of the worst moments of my career because I really felt awful. It was over, the knee was gone.”
The following year saw the seven-time Wimbledon champion Williams play her final match at the tournament — losing in the first round to world No 115 Harmony Tan. Sampras’s defeat to Bastl meanwhile was his last match at Wimbledon — an indignity suffered in the boondocks of Court No 2.
Nadal shares the inevitability of time and decline with his fellow greats. What sets him apart is that for someone as dominant as he has been on clay, any defeat on the surface at all will feel like a personal affront, a reminder of what’s been lost.
Those absurd 14 titles at Roland Garros are not an outlier on the ground-up brick — he has 12 at the Barcelona Open, 11 in Monte Carlo, and 10 at the Italian Open. He’s so synonymous with the Barcelona event that the main court there is named after him. Ranking points, 500s and 1000s aside, the pressure of returning on the surface you’ve made your own, at a tournament you’ve routinely won, on a court that literally bears your name, and suffering a sobering defeat is almost too ludicrous to comprehend.
It’s a risk he has chosen to take.
The reality is that Nadal could lose in the first round at Roland Garros without winning a game and it would scarcely tarnish his unrivalled legacy at the tournament. But try telling that to the most ferocious competitor that tennis, arguably any sport, has ever seen. A defeat at the 2024 French Open would take his loss percentage at the tournament from 2.6 per cent to 3.4 per cent, over 19 campaigns.
It is an infinitesimal blemish, barely a single ball mark on a court of sheer triumph.
For Nadal, even more than the watching world, it remains almost unthinkable.
(Photo: Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)
