Hamburg. At the Summer Olympics in Paris, some athletes are competing with the “wrong” hand. And very successfully.
One of the most emotional scenes this week at the Summer Olympics in Paris took place on Thursday night in Stadion Roland Garros The Spanish tennis legend Rafael Nadalnow 38 years old, met the American specialists Austin Krajicek and Rajeev Ram in the quarterfinals of the doubles competition with Carlos Alcaraz. The two Iberians, who were competing in a tournament together for the first time, had no match for the experienced US boys.
Shortly before the end, Nadal fended off a match point with a hard backhand like in his best days. The stadium exploded with excitement. But a few moments later, the match was over: the Spaniards lost 2:6, 4:6. There was dismay in the large arena, and even the US reporter, who should have been happy for her team, just said: “I don’t want it to be over.”
How a world star of sport was re-educated to be left-handed
Today, our Bergedorf blog “Volker’s World” is about left-handers. Rafael Nadal is one of the greatest tennis players ever. The 38-year-old has won 22 Grand Slam tournaments, including the French Open in Paris 14 times. He is one of only eight players in tennis history to have won all four Grand Slam tournaments. Björn Borg has never won the US Open, John McEnroe has never won the Australian Open, and Boris Becker has never won the French Open. Rafael Nadal has held up the winner’s trophy in Paris, Wimbledon, New York and Melbourne, and he has done it all with his left hand.
A lot of sensitivity in his left hand: Germany’s world-class table tennis player Timo Boll. © DPA Images | Tom Weller
Nadal is next to John McEnroe the best left-hander that has ever been on the tennis tour. Unlike the American, however, the Spaniard is actually not left-handed at all. In everyday life, he does everything with his right hand: writing, throwing, catching, everything! Only when he touches a tennis racket does Rafael Nadal mutate into a left-hander, because that is what his first coach, his uncle Toni Nadal, taught him in the early 1990s.
Raised as a left-hander: How Rafael Nadal became a successful tennis professional
Rafael, who was five years old at the time, held the racket with both hands on both forehand and backhand. His uncle didn’t like that. He instructed the boy to only hit the forehand with his left hand. “I said to Rafa: How many top players are there who hit with both hands? None! So you have to adapt. I chose the left hand for him because I thought he was left-handed,” Toni Nadal revealed to the Spanish tennis blog “Punto de Break” in 2022. It was only when the boy grew up that it became clear that he was actually right-handed.
On Monday, a second great left-hander in world sport will take part in the action in Paris: Timo Boll. The eight-time European champion and silver medalist at the Olympic Games in Beijing 2008 and Tokyo 2021 is the best table tennis player Germany has ever had. He is now 43 years old and will only be playing for the team at his seventh Olympic Games in Paris. Boll owes his class as a player to his exceptional eyesight. He is said to be able to recognize the manufacturer’s logo on a table tennis ball flying at 150 kilometers per hour and thus calculate the rotation of the ball faster and better than his competitors. At least that is how Deutsche Welle described it in a portrait.
Timo Boll: “Table tennis is my love and you can’t cheat on it”
But Boll’s greatest moment came when he had match point in the round of 16 against the Chinese world-class player Liu Gouzheng at the 2005 World Championship in Shanghai, when he scored the point and then claimed his own victory from the referee. Only eagle-eyed Boll had noticed that Gouzheng’s ball had only just touched the tabletop, and was therefore not out of play as everyone thought. The game continued and Boll ultimately lost the match. “We play table tennis because we love this sport, and you don’t cheat on love,” Boll said afterwards.
Five of the ten US presidents in the past 50 years were left-handed, including Barack Obama. © picture alliance / ASSOCIATED PRESS | Brynn Anderson
Because of his sporting success and his fairness, he was chosen as the German team’s flag bearer at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Table tennis is of particular value for left-handed research, as it was here that assumptions were first confirmed. It is assumed that around ten to 15 percent of humanity is left-handed. In a survey of almost 50,000 table tennis players worldwide, 13.4 percent of respondents said they played with their left hand.
On August 13th, the “World Left-Handers Day” is celebrated
Every year on August 13th, “World Left-Handers Day” is celebrated, which was founded in 1976 by Dean R. Campbell to draw attention to the disadvantages of left-handed people in a world dominated by right-handed people. It was a time when many people were still “re-educated” to be right-handed because writing with the left hand was considered a bad habit.
Left-handed Paul McCartney (l.) holds his instrument the other way around than George Harrison (2nd from left) and John Lennon (r.) of the Beatles in this photo from 1965. © picture alliance / Mary Evans/AF Archive | AF Archive
Many celebrities are left-handed. A well-known example is Paul McCartney, who stood out in the Beatles’ group photos because he held his instrument the other way around than his bandmates held their guitars. Among US presidents over the past 50 years, we have had just as many right-handed as left-handed people. Richard Nixon (1969-1974), Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), George Bush (1989-1993), Donald Trump (2017-2021) and Joe Biden (2021-2024) were or are right-handed, Gerald Ford (1974-1977), Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), Bill Clinton (1993-2001), George W. Bush (2001-2009) and Barack Obama (2009-2017) were left-handed.
Albert Einstein is mistakenly considered left-handed, but wrote with his right hand
The perception of left-handed people in society has changed fundamentally over the centuries. In the Middle Ages, left-handed women were burned as witches. Left-handed people were said to attract bad luck. This can still be seen in our current language. If someone behaves clumsily, they are “awkward”. In the recent past, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. Left-handed people were suddenly considered particularly creative, extremely clever and outstanding in every respect.
Also interesting
One example of this is Albert Einstein (1879-1955). The brilliant physicist is often mentioned as a prominent left-hander, although it is easy to see from old photos that he wrote his famous works with his right hand. But is there a special talent in left-handed people? In 2014, Chris McManus from University College London looked for connections between handedness and intelligence among 11,000 children in Great Britain. The result: There were an unusually high number of left-handed children among the children with a particularly high IQ – and also among the children with a particularly low IQ!
