Rafael Nadal is playing competitive tennis again. Happy new year, folks.
One doesn’t know, not even Nadal for that matter, for how long. However, as he walked off the Pat Rafter Arena on Sunday after his first tennis match in almost a year — partnering Marc Lopez, he lost the doubles first round of the Brisbane International to Max Purcell and Jordan Thompson 6-4, 6-4 — waving to the cheerful crowd wearing a big smile, you could tell the Spaniard enjoyed being back in his familiar territory.
He’ll go deeper in it when the 22-time Grand Slam champion turns up for his opening singles match of the ATP 250 event against fellow Slam winner Dominic Thiem (likely on Tuesday). That will be Nadal’s first competitive singles contest since his second-round defeat to Mackenzie McDonald at the 2023 Australian Open. Subsequent surgery in June on his left psoas muscle and a lingering hip problem ensured it would be his last singles match of the year. That saw the player who spent 209 weeks as world No.1 drop out of the top 5, 10, 100 and 500 (he is currently ranked 672).
It is the longest the man from Mallorca has stayed away from the sport he picked up when he was three and began playing professionally in 2001 as a 14-year-old who’d go on to capture 14 French Open titles alone. The over two-decade career that many thought wouldn’t last as long has had its vast and varied share of injuries (foot, ankle, shoulder, hip…we could go on) and forced, frustrating pauses. It’s also a career characterised by celebrated comebacks that invariably turn physical struggles into phenomenal silverware.
The latest round of rest-and-return though carries a different feel to it, given the length of his absence and age.
Nadal is 37, and the body, in contrast to his champion mind and competitive blood, has certain limitations in how long it can sustain the demands of professional tennis and how much pain it can endure. As his coach Carlos Moya, the former world No.1, said in an interview to ATP in December, “you’re at the point of your career when you’re no longer 20 years old”. Nadal and his team realised that fact this time through, as Moya put it, “a winding, tortuous road, with many curves” which kept testing Nadal’s patience and delaying his quest to come back one more time.
At some point in the middle of those challenging 11 months, there was a sense of despair — a term not often associated with Nadal.
“He had a more complicated operation than was first expected… and the recovery period was longer than expected,” Moya told ATP. “I had the feeling that it could be the end, that he’d have no chance to play again.”
But what’s Nadal without a fight, right? And so from doing his rehab on a boat in Greece to beginning to train lightly in August to gradually and carefully moving gears to announcing his return on the tour in December, the Spaniard will be up and running again Down Under.
Perhaps no one more than Nadal is so used to this exercise, having gone through it multiple times in his career. But the tenure of this pause is unprecedented even for him.
On top among his previous longest absence was a seven-month break from July 2012 to February 2013 due to tendonitis in his left knee. He came back to win the French Open and the US Open titles that year and regain his No.1 ranking. More recently, in 2021, Nadal shut his season in August owing to a chronic foot injury. Five months later, he went all the way at the 2022 Australian Open playing as good as ever and added another French Open trophy.
History suggests success is almost always greater than the setback when it comes to Nadal. Early signs carry promise this time around too. Holger Rune, who had a hit with Nadal in Brisbane, spoke highly of the intensity that he brought into “probably the hardest practice I’ve had the last half year”.
Factors like intensity, motivation and focus are never really a variable with the Spaniard. It’s the body that Nadal continues to be unsure about, even more so in his latest and final comeback attempt that may last a month, a year or even longer.
“It’s (been) one year. It’s surgery. It’s a long period of time not practicing at a decent level. For me, it is a little bit unpredictable (on) how things (are) going to be. Competing is different than practicing,” Nadal said in Brisbane on Sunday.
“I feel ready to compete. Then what can happen in the competition, I can’t know. I don’t know.”
There’s one thing we know for sure in all the uncertainty: Nadal is playing competitive tennis again.