On Sunday morning, Rafael Nadal withdrew from the 2024 Australian Open, which begins this weekend in Melbourne. His decision came as a blow but not exactly a shock. Two days earlier, the 22-time Grand Slam champion, now 37 years old and ranked No. 672 in the world, had lost in the quarterfinals of the Brisbane International to Australia’s Jordan Thompson after dropping three match points and ducking off court in the third set for a medical time-out. Nadal said later that he had sustained a muscle microtear — a different injury than the one that had forced him off the court for an entire year until last week. For two fleeting rounds of tennis, Nadal had improbably appeared to be in Nadal form. But his loss and subsequent withdrawal yielded a disappointing, if temporary, conclusion to his comeback tour and another reminder that even the most resilient body eventually hits its limits.
Nadal announced last spring that 2024 would likely be his final season as a professional player, but it is still difficult to reconcile the narrative of his bodily decline with the mythos of his career. He has always made it easy to believe in his immortality because he has always returned to the court from whatever punishments his body had doled out. He could break his foot or his finger; he could blow out his wrist, cramp his leg, fracture a rib, tear his abdomen or a hip flexor. He would self-resurrect. He defied the speculation of commentators and fans that, given the physical toll that his style of play — breathless, ruthless, cruel — took on his body, his career wouldn’t last past his 30th birthday, let alone his 35th. Somehow, he would eventually stalk back onto court the same, and scowl the same, and play the same. He seemed to be winning the unwinnable battle against impermanence. For those of us who have struggled with pain, he was a kind of totem — a perennial Babolat-wielding rebuke to suffering. And he had been this way from the start.
Nadal’s tortured, transcendent relationship with his physical form began in 1999 at the Boys’ Under-14 National Tennis Championship in Madrid. During a first-round match against one of his closest friends, Bartolomé “Tomeu” Salvá Vidal, Nadal tripped and fell in the middle of a point. The impact broke the little pinkie on his left hand, the dominant one he would later use to win 22 Grand Slams.
It must have swollen up instantly, a child’s finger in the Spanish heat. But Nadal’s father’s brother loomed just off-court — “Uncle Toni,” as he would soon be known in the tennis world. Over the years, it was as if he held the Infinity Stone of Nadal’s tenacity in the palm of his hand. Toni’s gospel was never to complain, or react at all. So Nadal neither taped his finger nor stopped the match. Instead, he won and played the next round and the round after that until he prevailed in the tournament’s final, the broken appendage dangling off his racquet.
This set a precedent. Nadal would perform similar acts of queasy magic for the next two decades.
In 2004, just as he was emerging as a tour heavyweight, he suffered a stress fracture to his left ankle while playing Frenchman Richard Gasquet in the quarterfinals of the Estoril Open. He withdrew from the tournament and was forced to skip what would have been his French Open debut. Nadal had missed the previous year’s French Open after fracturing his elbow during a practice session. But in 2005, he made it to Roland-Garros and won the title, two days after his 19th birthday. The remainder of his 2005 season may be the greatest ever recorded by a teenager. That October, during a five-setter against Ivan Ljubičić in the finals of the Madrid Masters, Nadal broke his left foot. He won the match.
This particular injury took a toll. The swelling wouldn’t subside, and the pain grew worse, not better. Nadal entered a grim cycle of visits to perplexed specialists who suggested only to keep resting and keep stretching, with reassurances that things would improve.They didn’t. A diagnosis finally arrived two months later: Müller-Weiss syndrome, a congenital bone defect in which the tarsal scaphoid is bigger than it was supposed to be and at constant risk of coming apart. As long as Nadal continued to play pro-level tennis, he would always be one Jenga block away from catastrophe.
He didn’t talk publicly about the injury for years (and confined mention of it to only four pages in his memoir, Rafa: My Story). Instead, he got insoles, and a team tinkered with the shape of them constantly. Nike made him a special shoe. Uncle Toni fed him balls across the net that he returned while seated in a chair. His misery subsided. Within four months of his Madrid win, he was competing again, and the following June he won his second French Open.
The tendinitis in both his knees would begin when he was 21.
At Wimbledon in 2007, the pain in his right knee was giving Nadal fits, though he made it to the final anyway and lost to Roger Federer. (He had lost to Federer in the 2006 final, too.) Two months later at the U.S. Open, the tendinitis in his left knee flared up but he hammered out wins until the fourth round, when he lost to his compatriot David Ferrer at almost two o’clock in the morning. The third installment of the Wimbledon finals trilogy between Nadal and Federer took place the following July. A rain delay complicated the timing of a numbing injection to Nadal’s foot such that, when play started, his foot was fully asleep. The match that unfurled over four hours and 48 minutes, with Nadal at last coming out on top, is still hailed as possibly the best of all time. Only on its 10th anniversary, when ESPN commemorated the match with a documentary, did Nadal speak about the pain he felt before it even began.
He bowed out of Wimbledon in 2009, weeks after losing in the fourth round of the French Open to Robin Söderling. (One of just three career losses on the Roland-Garros clay against 112 wins.) Nadal’s knee tendinitis was exacerbated by nonstop running, pounding pressure, and genetics, the nuclear-propulsion joints of his body now a chronic source of pain and interference. The New York Times wondered if he was “torn up.” At home, his parents were getting divorced and the depression he experienced permeated the remaining season.
Six months later, it was the right knee again and he withdrew from the 2010 Australian Open. In 2011, in the quarters of the Australian Open, he ruptured the adductor longus in his right thigh. At that year’s Wimbledon, he felt spiking pain in his left ankle all tournament long, but he limped it out, injected his foot, put it to sleep, and made it all the way to the finals. In 2012, he couldn’t make it to the London Olympics (his knees). Ahead of the 2012 U.S. Open, he withdrew (knees again). In 2014, his right wrist was displaced and needed a cast; he withdrew from the U.S. Open. By 2016, it was the left-wrist tendon that forced him out of competition for his tenth French Open victory. In 2017: knee. In 2018: knee, then ankle. Before he won his next French Open title, in 2022, his foot was put to sleep. The next month, he pulled out of the Wimbledon semifinals, after beating Taylor Fritz in the quarters, with a torn abdominal muscle.
By the time Nadal arrived at the 2023 Australian Open –– a tournament he had won the previous year, four months after foot surgery, four weeks after a bout with COVID –– he had secured 14 French Open titles, two Olympic gold medals, and 92 ATP titles overall. It was here when something deeper finally began to unravel. Nadal was down a set in the second round to Mackenzie McDonald, a young Californian who had bobbled in and out of the world top 50. On-camera, it looked like an invisible force had blocked Nadal mid-sprint across the baseline for a forehand. He briefly dropped to a squat, then hobbled off the court. He finished the match. Later, I texted a journalist who saw the moment of injury in person; he said it looked as if Nadal had been shot. An MRI revealed a grade-two hip-flexor tear, and when it hadn’t healed by the end of February, Nadal said he would be sad to miss the spring lineup of tournaments — Indian Wells, the Miami Open. Spring came and the hip wasn’t ready.
In March 2023, more than 20 years after that epochal junior win in Madrid, Nadal fell from the ATP’s top-ten rankings after spending 912 straight weeks there, 209 as the world No. 1. When he made his return to competitive play at Brisbane earlier this month after nearly 12 months of rest, recuperation, and cheerful updates on Instagram, it seemed, on paper, that the stage was set for a kind of third-act climax — probably not a title but at least a poetic resolution. Maybe Brisbane would be a runway to grit and certain glory in Melbourne, a semi-triumphant return to the scene of the slam that nearly bested him. Or maybe he would make it through a few rounds but then come back for real at the French Open, his natural habitat. After all, he had been temporarily defeated before by his ancient foes, pain and uncertainty, and always returned the victor.
This time, though, there was a sense of heavy inevitability in the air. Nadal didn’t seem particularly distressed when he announced he wouldn’t play in the Australian Open.
But I was. Nadal always came back. Maybe I could too.
In 2018, I tore my own right-hip labrum. I was 34, and the burn of it rolled down the back of my leg neatly, the way you would lay out a sleeping bag. A separate diagnosis came months later, inflammatory arthritis, and the joint stability around the labrum would worsen. Eventually, the pain grew stale and I found little ways to live around it, little tics and routines to keep it separate from the rest of what I was doing. A cruel rubber ball was involved in the physical therapy, pressure applied to release the psoas. Finally, there was surgery to repair the tear and its accompanying impingement, a reconfiguration that came with a postoperative cocktail of opioids, NSAIDs, blood thinners, stool softeners. I could feel where my joint had been filed. The first night, the theatrics were high and I wailed that I might not survive. But by four a.m. the pain had shifted and I fell asleep. Six months later, I tore the left. I had surgery on that one, too.
The ache of a compromised hip is specific, focused. It worms through your pelvis and into your back. Pressure builds if you sit too long and bursts if you don’t relieve it. At some point, I realized my hips were the center of everything, the place where the body folds in half, responsible for the perpendicular angles, for sitting, walking, and standing. Ambling after tennis balls with a lousy backswing would be a miraculous feat, let alone battling uninjured 20-year-olds for a championship title.
As I watched Nadal get older and richer and observed the effects of time on the appearance of his hair and the length of his shorts, it occurred to me that he had built me a cocoon, a place where the laws of time, physics, and entropy simply did not apply. An amnesiac style of The Truman Show where, just like him, I could keep returning, time and again, to the shape I used to be in. Now, the illusion was coming apart.
The U.S. Open is the only Grand Slam I have seen Nadal play in person. In September 2022, I watched him lose in the fourth round to the young American Frances Tiafoe. The match appeared over before it had begun; Nadal’s nose was still bloodied from an accidental self-inflicted injury earlier in the tournament. He looked tired. It was depressing to think that this scene in front of me — with Nadal worn out, unsure of his movements — might be the last time I ever saw him in the flesh. I left before it was over.
Come June, the sun will set on a Sunday afternoon after the final day of play at Roland-Garros. In the movie version, Nadal’s career ends here with him lifting the trophy for the 15th time. The thing that began in 2005, after two weeks of skids and slides, blood, sweat, disappointment, and euphoria, comes home to rest. If Federer’s last dance through a protracted series of losses is anything to go by, that’s not how it will happen. But if there’s anyone who could do it once more, one last reprimand to time and age and the frailties of the human body, it’s Rafael Nadal.
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