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“One tournament he can win is Roland Garros. So we’ll see. Hopefully not this year,” Rafael Nadal recently said of today’s opponent, Dominic Thiem, with a wink. It now feels like he willed that version of Thiem—the genuine French Open threat, the hardest-hitting guy on clay—into existence.
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Watch this guy here, the blond guy playing frantic, brilliant tennis, tracking down a lob for a whirling dervish winner.
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Allow me to remove my foot from my mouth: Rafael Nadal is still the King of Clay, fine. He claimed his 10th title at Monte Carlo last week, and looks set to take his 10th Barcelona Open title too, unless Andy Murray snaps out of his daze or Dominic Thiem manages the upset. Maybe his 10th French Open lies just a few…
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All the conditions seemed fit for Rafael Nadal. After so many hardcourt disappointments, a return to his dream surface, red clay, where every ball sails slow and high; a tournament where he’s posted a merciless 58-4 record in his career; no Roger Federers looming in the draw. Basically an invitation to loosen up,…
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Right after losing the Miami Open title to Roger Federer in straight sets Sunday, Rafael Nadal was asked how he felt about his “win.”
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Two famous rivals named Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal both got hurt, and both entered rehab cocoons for most of 2016, biding their time until this January. One emerged a radiant butterfly, posting a 19-5 record on the season, playing in two championship matches—a lovely comeback by any metric. But the other one…
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INDIAN WELLS, Calif.—Forget any bluster about age, resilience, rehabilitation: The story here is that Roger Federer may have solved Rafael Nadal. It’s never too late to iron out your flaws, especially if you have only one to speak of.
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INDIAN WELLS, Calif.—Juan Martin del Potro is a teddy bear with a heavy brow and a shotgun forehand, and when he gets mad in public, apparently, he hugs whoever happens to be around. Because he is a professional tennis player that person is usually a line judge. That’s what he did in a fit of rage three years ago, and…
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Today, out in the Coachella Valley, the Indian Wells Masters will begin. It’s the highest-profile tennis tournament in the world after the four Grand Slams, dropping a fat bounty of 1000 ranking points on its winners. Everyone in the tennis universe should be excited, except for Serena Williams and all her fans, after…
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Rafael Nadal will split ways with his longtime coach, Uncle Toni, at the end of the 2017 season, according to an interview Toni Nadal gave to the website Il Tennis Italiano over the weekend. Instead of traveling with his nephew, Toni Nadal said he will spend next season overseeing the Nadals’ tennis academy in…
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Yesterday we argued that Federer’s unusually strong backhand anchored his Australian Open win over Rafael Nadal, and today we found a startling statistical basis for that claim. It comes courtesy of the always helpful Jeff Sackmann at TennisAbstract. Relative to other sports, tennis remains fairly data-poor, but…
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“I’m a different player due to Rafa’s presence,” Roger Federer said in a 2015 press conference, and if you needed it, yesterday’s 6-4, 3-6, 6-1, 3-6, 6-3 Australian Open win offered the clearest possible evidence. When your defensive-genius nemesis applies crushing pressure on you for more than a decade, you might end…
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Thirty-five-year old Roger Federer took down old rival Rafael Nadal in five sets to win the Australian Open—his 18th Grand Slam title, but his first in five years.
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This photo’s from 2005—they were about to meet in a Grand Slam for the first time, the 2005 French Open, a semifinal match Rafael Nadal won before claiming the title, his first of many. They’d then spend about a decade at the top of the game, sucking up all the available oxygen, dominating all majors in sight. Then…
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Rafael Nadal dug around and exploited two glitches in the Milos Raonic serving machine—two successfully converted break points, that is—to win his Australian Open quarterfinal 6-4, 7-6 (7), 6-4. And now he’s surveying a field full of the prettiest one-handed backhands in all the land. Roger Federer’s got the regal…
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Rafael Nadal put up a sweat-saturated 6-3, 6-3, 4-6, 6-4 performance to end Gael Monfils’s run at the fourth round of the Australian Open. Through the first two sets it looked like old-school Nadal dominance. Both sixth seed Monfils and ninth seed Nadal are rangy scramblers who cover every inch of the baseline,…
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One of the under-looked perks of tennis stardom is that you’re often being handed marsupials. Rafael Nadal got to hold this koala at the start of the Brisbane International. His grin and the bear’s claws appear to be saying very different things.
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