Rarely has he been so explicit, and that’s because Rafa Nadal doesn’t usually beat around the bush when he stands in front of a microphone and talks about tennis. Showing the same clarity of ideas that he has always shown, he had no qualms about clearly analysing the moment he is going through, which has lasted for two years now. “It’s been a beating for a long time,” he summed up, bluntly, after his defeat to Novak Djokovic in the second round of the Paris Games. “If I’m not able to play against a player like him and I’m not able to defend like I did years ago, then I lose like I lost. It was a match for which I didn’t know if I was ready to play at a certain level and I wasn’t,” the Mallorcan resigned himself.
The question now, once “the stage that he had set for himself up to the Olympic Games is over” after also losing in the doubles to Carlos Alcaraz, is whether it will be possible to rescue the competitive Nadal, or if on the contrary it is better to take a definitive step aside and stop. Having passed the age of 38 and after two seasons full of disappointments, The Balearic player is now debating whether or not to continue trying to recover, if that is even possible at this point, his competitive version. and is taking the road to retirement that has cost so much to the great legends of the sport.
“When I’m clear about what my next step is, when I’m clear about my motivations, whether with a racket in my hand or without, I’ll let you know,” explained the winner of 22 Grand Slams, who during the tournament was fed up with the repetitive questions about the date of his retirement. “I can’t be coming here every day analyzing whether this is my last match or not. I’ve earned the right to finish as I please. It seems like you want to retire me,” Nadal complained, who has not won a title since he won his 14th Roland Garros in June 2022 and He has only been able to play 28 official matches in the last two years, with a record of 14-14obviously far from his career numbers.
Only one of those fourteen victories came against a player in the top-30 of the ATP rankings (De Miñaur, Madrid 2024). Away from clay, the record is 4-8. Or what is the same, in the last two seasons he has only won four matches on hard court, the surface he will be using from now until the end of the year. And the outlook, given what has been seen in recent months, looks complicated, with the question looming on the horizon as to whether it is worth continuing to try and risk taking the path of a fight against time that other giants of the history of the sport have already undertaken, in their case without much success, who did not have farewells worthy of their legacy.
From Ali to Bolt
There are only a handful of legends who have managed to retire in style, as Michael Phelps did at the 2016 Rio Games, where he called it a day after winning five more golds. An event in which Usain Bolt also said goodbye to speed by repeating the triple crown (100, 200 and 4×100 metres), although far from the stratospheric times of his best days. While Phelps stood firm, Bolt, who had said in 2013 that the 2016 Games would be the last of his career, took a step back and indulged in one last dance that was not at all successful at the 2017 World Championships in London.
“A World Cup doesn’t change what I did. Someone came and told me that Muhammed Ali He also lost his last fight.he added, recalling one of the most paradigmatic cases of these difficulties of the great legends to retire.
Tennis – Djokovic-Nadal / JUANJO MARTIN
Ali announced on June 26, 1979 in Los Angeles that he was giving up his world title and retiring from boxing. “I’m exhausted, I have nothing to prove. I think it’s the best thing to do, to retire as a champion, as the greatest,” said Ali, 37, who was already beginning to take a toll on the punches, with reflexes that were not the same and a slower speech. first symptoms of what later led to Parkinson’s disease, which he suffered from.
But despite his own reasoning, he wasn’t ready to say goodbye. And nine months into his retirement, in March 1980, he changed his mind and returned to fight Larry Holmes, largely driven by financial problems from bad investments and because he had been cheated by people close to him. Holmes, who was his sparring partner from 1973 to 1975, He punished him relentlessly in Las Vegas and Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, had to stop the fight in the tenth round.
A serious warning that his end in the ring had come. But Ali continued to insist. And he stepped into the ring against Trevor Berbick on December 11, 1981, almost two years after the humiliating defeat against Holmes, claiming that he needed to win a fourth world title. Since in the United States they did not give him the medical approval to fight, Ali went to Nassau, in the fight known as ‘Drama in the Bahamas’, where Berbick, 27, defeated him without problems. The day after his fifth defeat, he hung up his gloves, this time for good, when Parkinson’s was already beginning to show more than obvious symptoms of its onset.
Sampras, retired at the top
There are few exceptions of legends who have said goodbye at the top. The aforementioned Phelps is one, and Pete Sampras, the most successful tennis player until the emergence of the Big Three (Djokovic, Nadal and Federer) another. The American’s last match was, at just 32 years old, the final of the 2002 US Openin which he defeated his compatriot Andre Agassi, his great rival at the time.
“It would be nice to hang up my racket after beating an opponent like Andre in a final, but I still want to compete. I love playing,” he said at the time, hinting that he would return in 2003. But he thought twice and did not play again, as months later he announced that it was his last match as a professional. “I had nothing left to prove and it was easy to retire, but at the same time it’s hard to say goodbye to something you’ve been doing for so many years. “I’m delighted with how I said goodbye. It was time,” the 14-time Grand Slam champion acknowledged years later.
Other examples
Jack Nicklaus He won the last of his 18 majors in golf twenty years before saying goodbye. Tiger Woods struggles on the courses far from the level that made him a star and only participates in Grand Slam tournaments for the Physical after-effects of his 2021 car accident.
Diego Armando Maradona was involved in a thousand controversies at the end of his career, between suspensions and his ups and downs in spirit. Cristiano Ronaldo is currently in the Saudi League and his recent performances with the national team in the World Cup and the European Championship are causing his image to be called into question. The opposite of what happened to Zinedine Zidane, who left at the age of 33 and still playing at a high level, playing in the 2006 World Cup final, although sent off after headbutting Materazzi.
Others ended up getting bitten by the bug and when they returned they didn’t even come close to the level that made them great. This happened to Michael Jordan, who in his ‘last dance’ with the Washington Wizards, with whom he signed after returning from his second retirement from the courts, didn’t even make the NBA playoffsOr Michael Schumacher, who after being a seven-time champion and saying goodbye to motor racing as a legend at Ferrari, returned and ended up becoming one more player in Formula 1, achieving a podium in his last three years with Mercedes.
