Rafa Nadal's brutal career is over

Nadal’s career is over. He did it in a sad way, but that’s it. With 22 grand slams won and countless records and triumphs, the tennis player from Manacor has had a nightmare last couple of years due to injuries. An ordeal that began shortly after winning his last Roland Garros, in mid-2022, a year that had started brilliantly by also winning the Australian Open.

That January 30, Rafael Nadal won his twenty-first Grand Slam in Melbourne, being the tennis player who had won the most in history at that time, and managing to reinforce his already solid candidacy for best player ever. It was an epic comeback against Medvedev, with whom in the third set he was losing two sets to zero, two games to four and 0-40 on serve. I had a 3% chance of winning that match.

But not even with those does the Balearic player have such unanimous recognition in Spain as would be expected.

Nadal has been an exemplary athlete; mentally strong, respectful, competitive, fighter; He always stands up, is humble in his statements and measured in his actions. So what’s wrong with it so that the admiration is not unanimous?

In Spain, various dimensions of the characters are not separated. Most of Nadal’s detractors are simply haters who do not share his political views—which lurk on the right, presumably—and his patriotism, an endemic dispute in Spanish society. But those things refer exclusively to the person, not the artist or his work. They are only aspects of the human dimension of the player, elements that should not directly interest us, and, perhaps, hardly even be known.

As a great tennis player that he is, we should only be interested in his work, which is enormous and full of successes and epic moments, and his dimension as an artist, or as a player, and the values ​​that he represents as such, that is, someone who never gives up. He gives up, he excels, he always gets up, he is not afraid of success and he accepts failure.

The purpose of this article is not to judge Nadal the person, it is precisely to avoid doing so. And prevent it from being done. It doesn’t matter who Nadal votes for, not even what his favorite soccer team is, both recurring themes among his detractors. The Balearic is one of those players who transcends the purely sporting dimension, but does not have to transcend that of the athlete.
When Rafa came back from the sensational match against Daniil Medvedev, that animosity towards Nadal the person meant that many did not see the brutal dimension of that feat in particular and of his entire enormous career in general, as well as the enormous athlete that the Spaniard is. In fact, this has nothing to do with wanting the Balearic to lose because you can have sympathy for other players.

That is a very common evil in Spanish culture. It happens with other sports icons whose success is beyond any doubt, such as Fernando Alonso, Gerard Piqué or Xavi Hernández. If they were cases of public support for extremist or genocidal ideas, perhaps we could explain those situations. This not being the case, we must analyze the possible causes for this attack on professionals due to private beliefs or, even, in some cases, supposed private beliefs that are not even verified.

It would be necessary to see if historical icons from any field today would not be subject to such widespread ‘hate’, I am sure they would, and it would also be necessary to understand the reasons for these animosities. Many would even see themselves attacking icons that they defend at all costs today. I admit that it is a situation that in many cases I would like to see.