PARIS – Give me time, asks Rafael Nadal. And stop asking me every day about my retirement.
The 6-1, 6-4 drubbing of Serbia’s Novak Djokovic was resounding, and Nadal is under no illusions about what his second-round exit from the Paris 2024 Olympics means. Now all that’s left for him is the doubles alongside Carlos Alcaraz.
‘There was one player much better than the other and we have to accept that. For an hour it was hard to digest everything that was happening, although I did (…). I wasn’t able to play at the level I needed to create problems for him, he didn’t give me practically nothing either, he was quite inspired for a long time’.
‘I don’t have the legs of 15 years ago either, so without ball quality and without the legs of 15 years ago, you’re not going to create problems for the best player in history’.
That solved, the unknown is the future of Nadal. Since an injury prevented him from playing in the Wimbledon semi-final in July 2022, the Spaniard has hardly played at all. He says that’s precisely the problem: his tennis works, but if he doesn’t test it regularly, it fails.
‘Although it makes little sense to many, I’ve been suffering for two years. The hip, and I’ve been a long time recovering. But I’m feeling better physically. Obviously, if I feel I’m not competitive, if I don’t have the ability to be competitive, I’m going to make the decision to leave. But I’ve played very little, I’ve played very few tournaments since I had my hip operation. An important operation, which is not easy to recover from. It’s been a little over a year since the operation. The regeneration of all that is not so fast’.
Visibly exhausted from hearing the same question over and over again, Nadal asked the journalists for a truce.
Nadal asks for time
‘You seem to want to retire me!’ he complained.
‘I try to do what I can to try to enjoy myself and to give myself the option to be competitive. If after here I don’t feel like playing, then I’ll let you know and that’s it. But leave a little bit to me on a day-to-day basis and choose what I have to do when I have to do it’.
‘What I have to decide I will decide after the Games. I can’t be thinking about it all day long, you know what happens, I come here and you ask me the same question every day and in the end, you know what happens? It’s very difficult to recover an optimum level if I’m thinking every day whether I’m going to retire or not, isn’t it? So I try to live my day by day’.
