Jordi Díez, sculptor, remembers that day.
The day he shouted:
–Rafa is already here!
Five years have passed since that day when our sculptor forged his work in steel, a golden rectangle measuring three meters by 5.40 m wide, 2.60 m high and 1.5 m deep, the result of which can be seen today in the Roland Garros venue, in Paris: the statue of Rafael Nadal.
Jordi Díez says:
–I was working on his face. And in a second, suddenly, the figure looked back at me. Then I shouted: 'Rafa is already here!' Because from that moment on she was no longer alone in the workshop. Now there was a person who accompanied me to work.
(...)
This Wednesday at mid-afternoon, inwardly, the organization of the Open Banc Sabadell-Trofeo Conde de Godó, the tournament that starts this Monday, shouted:
–Rafa is already here!
And as if it were magic, as if it were a dream, the figure of Rafael Nadal (37), already a mature, autumnal tennis player, emerged in a corner of the RCTB center court, the one that bears the name of the Manacorí: Rafael Nadal court . And with him his team appeared, the technicians Carlos Moyá and Gustavo Marcaccio, the physiotherapist Rafael Maymó and the agent Carlos Costa, and then, the man greeted the people of the other group, Javier Luengo (coordinator responsible for Next Gen of the RCTB) and David Jordà (29), a giant from Tarragona who is ranked 298th in the world, and the two tennis players, Nadal and Jordà, were preparing to hit him hard.
That's right: in the presence of several hundred onlookers, Nadal hit him really hard.
Screaming as he hit, the manacorí was adjusting his right.
And he watched how the giant responded to him on the other side.
And it was said that maybe, it is possible, why not, the probabilities grow with the days, return to the slopes in the next few days. And he would do it right in Barcelona, where he has won twelve times, no one has done so much before, it is unlikely that anyone will do the same one day.
(For now, Alcaraz, absent these days in Monte Carlo due to a muscle problem in his forearm, has two titles).
And those of us lucky enough to be able to watch him again, some of us skeptical as there have already been a few interruptions – the Manacorí has barely played three matches this year, apart from the exhibition with Alcaraz in Las Vegas –, we listened, during the breaks, to how Nadal analyzed his game and the heaviness of the balls, and we saw how he manipulated the handle and spread the towel in the planter and lined up the bottles on the clay, all that liturgy that remains there and will never pass away.
