PARIS – At 20:48 in Paris, the final whistle blew. Spain’s Rafael Nadal said goodbye forever to the Olympic Games. And to the orange clay that made him one of the greatest and most amazing sportsmen of all time?
‘Rafa, Rafa, Rafa!’ shouted the spectators at the Philippe Chatrier, accumulating more than an hour of anguish at the advent of the irreversible. They sang and shouted with admiration and nostalgia at the same time, they applauded in a combination of relief, sorrow, excitement and gratitude to the man who, over 20 years, made them live what they had believed until then to be non-existent.
They were paying homage to the athlete who made the impossible possible.
It was the last Olympic night, was it the last night in Paris?
After the match, Nadal left open the possibility that tonight he has played his last match in Paris, and he said it in the best Nadal style, affirming and denying at the same time.
“I haven’t said I’m saying goodbye to Paris. That is clear, but it is possible that I have said goodbye, but I have not said I have said goodbye,’” said the former world number.
Nadal’s most optimistic plan is to continue playing in 2025, but August will give him food for thought: he is no longer just a formidable tennis player, he is Xisca’s husband and the father of Rafa jr., to whom one day they will explain what happened on this night when he was in a stadium without yet understanding what he was seeing.
He saw much more than the 6-2, 6-4 victory of Americans Austin Krajicek and Rajeev Ram over his father, the 38-year-old living legend, and Carlos Alcaraz, the amazing present-future 21-year-old.
It’s (almost) 20 years later: 17 August 2004 in Athens, 31 July 2024 in Paris. Between those two dates is compressed the great story of Nadal at the Olympic Games. It began on an afternoon of intense, dry heat in Greece, the birthplace of Olympism, and ended in France, on a humid, 30-degree night at Roland Garros, the scene of the most amazing story tennis has ever told, that of a man capable of winning the same Grand Slam tournament 14 times.
That August afternoon in Athens, locked in a whitewashed room with the smell of fresh paint, I asked an 18-year-old Nadal how he felt about having had such a swift passage through the Athens Games. Two days earlier he had won his first ATP title in the Polish resort of Sopot, but the Games had been debut and farewell: Nadal and Carlos Moya, now his coach, lost 7-6 (8-6), 6-1 to the Brazilian duo of André Sá and Flavio Saretta.
“For me it was a goal to be here, also in singles. It couldn’t be because in Spain there is a very good level, I couldn’t be in the top four. Well, that’s the way it is.”
No, no. There would be much more than that.
There would come the six victories in Beijing 2008 to win gold in singles, the injury break in London 2012, when he was going to be the flag bearer, the frustrating fourth place in Rio 2016, compensated by the gold in doubles with Marc Lopez, the absence in Tokyo 2020 and this last appearance in singles and doubles. In Paris, of course, to meet Alcaraz the person, not just the tennis player, and to symbolically hand over the baton of Spanish tennis.
Muggy heat, overflowing humidity and the roof of the Philippe Chatrier closed due to the rain that hovered over Paris all day. The air did not move, it was difficult to breathe and play on Nadal’s last Olympic night. Because the Philippe Chatrier is not a roofed stadium, it is a stadium to which a roof was added, which is not the same thing. And, profoundly Parisian, without air conditioning. Something unimaginable in American sport.
Nadal’s farewell to the Games showed what a real doubles match is like against a two-singles line-up, however extraordinary they may be. The Americans have mastered the codes of doubles tennis. You could see it, for example, in the second point of the second game.
Who has priority, who hits? Unanswered question before a volley to the middle by Krajicek and Ram that neither Nadal, with his left foot, nor Alcaraz, with his forehand, managed to return. The limits of a doubles of non doubles players who had only had a couple of training sessions and two matches together.
A doubles of non doubles players that the spectators loved and that will, paradoxically, make many children want to try their hand at doubles, so much was the energy, passion, enthusiasm and adrenaline generated by the Spaniards.
Nadal said goodbye to the Olympic Games
The three matches that Nadal and Alcaraz shared in Paris are a gift to the greatest and most emotional history of sport. Anyone who loves to compete, anyone who seeks to better themselves, should watch those three matches from start to finish at least once in their lives.
They would understand, no doubt, why it is said, and how true it is, that sport is much, much, much more than numbers, much, much more than statistics. When he finally retires, Nadal will be able to explain it like no one else.
