Rafael Nadal’s last dance is a marvel, but his body is creaking under the strain

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Rafael Nadal has won 92 titles, including 22 Grand Slams. He has earned more than US$134-million in prize money. He has been playing tennis seriously since he was eight years old.

He has a young son to raise and a loving extended family to welcome him home to the Spanish island of Mallorca. You would think he might be eager to give his battered body a rest and hang up his racquets.

Not a chance. Not yet. Like so many aging greats, from Muhammad Ali to Tom Brady to Bruce Springsteen, he is resisting the inevitable and playing on. Though still recovering from a string of injuries and ranked only 512th in the world, he is back at one of his favourite tournaments, the Madrid Open, hoping to prolong his legendary career for at least a little longer.

His determination is a marvel to witness. You could see it even on the practice courts at Madrid’s Magic Box tennis complex. Nadal is more imposing up close than he looks on screen, heftier and broader in the shoulders. His legs are like tree trunks. His famously ripped arms tense as he awaits a shot from one of the two hitting partners on the other side of the net.

When the shot comes, he strikes it with a swing that brings his left arm up and around his head like a cowboy cracking a whip. The ball whistles just over the net, then dips down to skid off the red clay on the other side, the product of the heavy top spin generated by that whipping motion. His partners scramble to reach his shots, gasping from the effort.

For most players, practice is a reasonably relaxed affair, with a certain amount of banter and horseplay thrown in. For Nadal, it is preparation for battle. He takes it so seriously and hits so hard that opponents don’t even like to warm up with him, complaining he tires them out even before the match begins.

His practice session this Wednesday went for more than an hour. As his young heir apparent and countryman, Carlos Alcaraz, dodged around the adjoining court, Nadal ground relentlessly on in the growing heat, pausing only to towel himself off or to mutter self-criticisms to coach Carlos Moyá.

In these moments of action at least, Nadal shows no sign that he is a man who is in the final months, possibly the final weeks, of a legendary career. He turns 38 on June 3, putting him well past the usual retirement age for tennis players. He suggested last year that 2024 would be his last on the tour.

His gladiator’s frame is creaking under the strain of more than 20 years pounding around hot tennis courts, playing every point as if it were his last.

A bad foot has given him trouble for years. He played and won the French Open in 2022 only by injecting the foot with painkillers. A subsequent hip injury kept him off the court for 11 months. Another injury in Australia early this year took him out of action again.

He could not play this spring’s Monte Carlo tournament, saying that “my body simply won’t allow me.” He was bounced from the next one, in Barcelona, by an early loss to the up-and-coming Australian, Alex de Minaur.

Nadal recognizes that the end is near. The whole tennis world knows that this is his last dance. Yet he is still not prepared to set an end date.

His appearance at Madrid, the place, as he puts it, “that has given me everything,” is not just a farewell gig. It’s a tryout. He wants to see whether he is fit enough to go on to play the French Open, which he has won a record 14 times. Appearing there for a last time in late May, and then perhaps even in the Paris Olympics this summer, would be a fitting conclusion to an epic run.

He tells the media in Madrid that things can change very quickly in sports, both for worse and for better. Though he is not feeling close to top level, he wants to give himself at least a chance to get there and enjoy one last hour in the sun. And he can’t do that unless he shows up and plays.

And so, the day after that fierce practice session, he walked into Manolo Santana Stadium at the heart of the huge and bustling Magic Box. The capacity crowd roared for their hero, who came wearing a fluorescent orange jacket and matching headband. He waved in acknowledgement, took his seat by the umpire’s chair and then began obsessively arranging his gear, a familiar ritual that includes placing two water bottles next to each other on the ground and taking a sip from each one in turn.

His opponent was a skinny 16-year-old American, Darwin Blanch, who was born 21 years after Nadal and could not quite believe he was facing the great Rafa. Nadal took the first game without losing a point and never looked back, crushing the kid in two sets (6-1, 6-0) and seeming as dominant as ever. The same whiplash forehands, the same torquing, double-handed backhand, the same moaning grunts with each shot, even the same weird plucking of the shorts that fans love to mock. In one of the few entertaining exchanges in this cakewalk, the older man traded rapid-fire volleys at the net with his rival and came out ahead.

Whether this is the beginning of a mini-comeback and a triumphant return to the Roland Garros tennis grounds in Paris is of course impossible to say. Nadal himself would be the first to concede that beating a teenager doesn’t mean much. His notoriously strict coach, his uncle Toni, taught him never to pat himself on the back. If he hit a brilliant forehand, Toni would say: Big deal, work on your serve.

Nadal still has to get past de Minaur again, in a match on Saturday, not to mention the other strong young players he would have to face after that in the tournament’s second week. If he did manage to go deep in Madrid, the strain might hobble him and keep him away from Roland Garros. He is gauging all of this, striving to do his best while husbanding his strength.

Even so, it is impossible not to be impressed, even moved, by Nadal’s grit. It would be easy now just to take a bow, leave the stage and go on, like his great rival Roger Federer, to a life of endorsements and celebrity meet-and-greets.

Félix Auger-Aliassime, the brilliant Canadian player from Quebec, says he was thinking about Nadal while winning a second-round match on Thursday. Nadal has been winning for so long, he said, that fans take his accomplishments for granted, assuming he is just a natural winner and forgetting that he was once just a scrappy kid from Mallorca. He willed himself into the warrior he is, battling injury, pain and doubt and yet “always, always, always going out on top.”

In his 2011 book Rafa, written with author John Carlin, Nadal and his family remind us that he is a vulnerable, rather nervous creature who is afraid of thunderstorms, deep water, dogs and the dark. He is also a messy guy who leaves his hotel rooms in turmoil. That such a man should become an ultradisciplined, supermeticulous samurai is, as Auger-Aliassime says, remarkable and, for the Canadian, inspirational.

Nadal has worked so hard in part because, as he put it in his book, “I am very, very keenly aware of how short the life of a professional athlete is, and I cannot bear the thought of squandering an opportunity that might never come again.”

Now that the end of that life is finally in sight, he seems resolved to go out fighting.

Editor’s note: In a previous version of this article, Muhammad Ali’s name was misspelled. This version has been corrected.