For the RCTB, having Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz at their facilities, both together in the next few days, is getting more complicated minute by minute.
On Saturday the draw will be raffled in Pedralbes and the organizers of the Barcelona Open Banc Sabadell-Trofeo Conde de Godó continue on tenterhooks.
How is the manacorí?
Are you ready for battle, or are you still on the wagon?
Nadal (36) sees it as dark gray. The man from Manacor, the tennis player with twelve RCTB titles, continues to train at home in the Balearic Islands, but in reality he wonders where he is: he is suffering from an iliopsoas injury in his left leg, a problem that had appeared in January, when Mackenzie McDonald was being measured at the Australian Open, and the matter has stretched like gum.
The six or eight weeks of recovery have become an eternity of three months whose end is still unknown, a circumstance that has thrown him off the ATP ranking (today, Nadal is 14th in the world, he was not so far behind since May of 2005) and has banned him from all winter tournaments and, for now, spring.
Week by week, the tournaments have been falling from the agenda. Nadal aspired to reappear on the scene in Indian Wells, in early March. And in his absence, in Miami, fifteen days later. None of this was going to be possible.
"Let's go up to date," answered sources around him when La Vanguardia requested an audience. The resignation to the American tour was going to last until the start of spring. The clay court flourished, and Nadal continued without issuing signals.
If he did, he did it on the networks: an inspiring video, some blows under the sun, at his academy in Manacor...
Time would end up on him and would weigh him down for the Monte Carlo Masters 1,000, a tournament that is being held these days, the prelude to the RCTB. Right now, Nadal is not saying yes or no.
"We are in contact with Nadal's team every day," sources from the Barcelona tournament said this Thursday to this newspaper. They are testing themselves and they will make the decision."
The decision is imminent. It shouldn't go beyond Friday. The draw must be rounded off, which will be drawn on Saturday: the problem, according to the same sources, does not center so much on the manacorí's injury, but rather on his fitness. Nadal has been rallying daily for four weeks, but he ignores his real condition. He wonders if he's competitive.
Alcaraz (19), 2022 champion, second racket in the world today, will be in the draw. The Murcian teenager will arrive in Barcelona on Thursday night and at noon on Friday he will train at the RCTB.
Alcaraz, who has won two tournaments in 2023 (Buenos Aires and Indian Wells), and has played the final in Rio and the semifinal in Miami, had resigned from Monte Carlo after citing post-traumatic arthritis in his left hand and discomfort in the spine, but these days he has already rediscovered himself.
