The tunnel is narrowing for Rafael Nadal (37), the tennis icon who resists but there is no way, he can't.
This is how he expressed it this afternoon, through social networks:
-These are difficult times for me sportingly speaking. Unfortunately I inform you that I am not going to play in Monte Carlo. My body just won't let me.
The matter is tortuous for Nadal, determined as he is to reach the clay phase and even project himself towards Roland Garros and the Paris 2024 Games, trapped between his mind and his body.
The mind burns, but the body turns its back.
The evolution of his ailments is a secret that he and his team barely interpret. The problems start long ago, and have been accentuated since the spring of 2022, that of his last Grand Slam title (the 22nd), that sensational victory signed in Dantesque conditions, broken the scaphoid in his left foot, lame the next day , so painful that he couldn't stand up.
Everything that followed was a concatenation of injuries, a kind of puzzle that became dislocated and finally disfigured, until it ended up blocking his sporting career.
At Wimbledon, a month and a half after his triumph in Paris, Nadal had to give up playing in the semifinal against Nick Kyrgios, victim of a torn abdominal muscle.
"I can't serve at a correct speed or make normal serving movements. I can't imagine winning many matches like this, it seems practically impossible to me (...) I can't risk so much as to spend three or four months out of competition."
So much prevention was of little use to him.
Six months later, at the Australian Open, the manacorí suffered a strange injury to his iliopsoas, an issue that should have been corrected in six weeks and would end up costing him the entire course. He would not play again for the entire year: in May he announced that he was going to take a temporary break to forget about tennis, replenish his body and consider a last year in 2024, that of the Paris Games.
He was thinking about his family and Rafael, his one and a half year old child.
Fed up with going to consultations, undergoing tests and enduring surgeries, Nadal had decided to gather his candles and wait for better times. While Carlos Alcaraz, the new icon of tennis in our country (Wimbledon champion in July 2023, his second major title), multiplied, the Manacorí prepared to work in the shadows.
In those months, I shared videos on social networks. He showed himself hitting hard at his academy in Manacor, determined to get back into the ring.
And I was going to do it.
He was going to play three games in 2024, all of them in Brisbane: he knocked down Thiem and Kubler before giving in to Jordan Thompson, already in the quarterfinals, and announcing new problems. Now, another muscle tear in the damaged psoas area.
Reverse.
He was going to stop again, in theory for a short time, refusing to compromise, insisting that he planned to appear on the American winter tour.
All he was going to do, from then to now, was going to face Carlos Alcaraz. He did it in that experiment designed by Netflix in Las Vegas.
Since then, darkness again.
"I am not ready to play at the highest level in Indian Wells," he was going to communicate a week later, already then committing himself to the clay court that is now taking shape in Monte Carlo, Masters 1,000 whose main draw begins this Sunday.
The Monegasque organizers and also the Barcelona ones (the Barcelona Open Banc Sabadell-Trofeo Conde de Godó begins in nine days) were rubbing their hands at the possibility of contemplating the return of the Manacorí.
Everything remains up in the air now, not only Nadal's presence at the RCTB or the Bois de Boulogne, but also his hypothetical return one day: today he is the 649th racket in the world.
