Rafael Nadals Coach Carlos Moya Hints at Retirement in 202....

Rafael Nadal has a higher success rate at winning matches at Roland Garros than I do tying my own shoes. I’m more likely to fumble one of my shoestrings than he is to lose three sets on clay to any other tennis player. Going into this year, Nadal had won 112 of 115 matches at the clay-court major. It is not just one of the great feats in tennis, but one of the most consistent performances in any competitive human endeavor. Being that good at something must make it incredibly difficult to stop, as Nadal’s almost-38-year-old body was perhaps telling him to do.

So if this really was to be Rafael Nadal’s last time playing at Roland Garros, a tournament he has dominated as utterly as any athlete has any given patch of earth, then there were lots of people who wanted to see him win. His millions of fans would have liked to see him push through a few rounds on Court Philippe-Chatrier before saying goodbye. The French Open, which has a history so entangled with this 14-time champion that in 2021 it erected a statue of him on the grounds—Nadal’s dad was seen admiring it this week—would certainly have enjoyed selling out the stadium for a few more matches. The documentary team reportedly following Nadal to chronicle this final phase of his career would’ve liked some meatier material. There was a lot bound up in the idea of Nadal performing well here, of ending this long-running story on sufficiently beautiful terms.

That’s why the identity of his first-round opponent was so outrageous. Various maladies plunged Nadal to the No. 275 rank in the world, which meant he had to enter Roland Garros using a protected ranking, a tool intended to ease transition for players returning from injury or pregnancy. For the first time in Nadal’s career, he was playing this tournament unseeded.

Seeding is a form of protection. It buys a player time before they have to confront the most dangerous opponents lurking in the draw; it’s a mechanism to ensure richer matchups later in the tournament. But Nadal, without a seed, was exposed to total randomness, which is why gasps rang out at the draw ceremony when his first-round matchup was revealed: Alexander Zverev, the tournament’s fourth seed, a very recent winner of a big title in Rome, and a fairly plausible winner of this tournament. If ever there were conclusive proof that these tournaments do not rig the draws, here it is. Nadal would get no opportunity to tune up his game against a soft opponent; Zverev was almost certain to end his career at Roland Garros. He’s also a deeply unpleasant co-star for such a match: Zverev is currently in the middle of a trial in Berlin criminal court, appealing a penalty order for allegedly assaulting his former partner. (He does not have to attend the proceedings in person.)

Zverev said that when he was first informed of his first-round opponent, he figured his brother was messing with him. But he also said that he was grateful to have another opportunity to play Nadal. The last time the two faced off here, in the 2022 semifinals, Zverev was playing well enough to topple the great champion, which remains a hypothetical, because in the second set Zverev turned his ankle catastrophically and tore several ligaments, sidelining him for seven months. “I really wanted to play him one more time,” he told reporters, “because I didn’t want my last memory to be me rolling off in a wheelchair off Philippe-Chatrier.” Despite Nadal’s relative lack of preparation before the tournament, Zverev said he was preparing as if to play him at his peak. He brought up the 2022 edition, when Nadal had won none of his warm-up tournaments on clay but nevertheless dominated the tournament.

Nadal plays funny games with hope. He isn’t the type to close doors conclusively—he would not commit to saying that this was his last French Open—and he likes to update his thinking depending on his present sensations. He speaks a lightly mangled and deeply intuitive English, a broken poetry full of rhetorical questions, bespoke idioms and classic one-offs: “ombelleeble,” “what happen-ed,” “my famous ass,” to pick just a few. His life has been dense and intense enough that he seems to have acquired wisdom at twice the normal rate. And while he is honest about the ravages tennis has inflicted on his body, he always leaves open the possibility that he might restore himself to former glories. Nadal’s press conference before the tournament was a masterclass in his usual charms and optimism, and it left the faint and irrational impression that he could survive this first-round test.

It had been a bit of a bizarre year for him. Nadal entered 2024 fresh, playing a warmup tournament for the Australian Open and looking as sharp as he had in years; in his third match, he pulled up lame with a hip issue. He sat out for three months and recovered in time for the clay season, but nothing he did on his favorite surface was terribly convincing. In his last match in Rome, he was routed by the kindly and big-serving world No. 9 Hubert Hurkacz, 6-1, 6-3. He hadn’t lost a match that badly on clay since 2003. But suddenly, there he was in this press conference, riffing loosely about the positive feelings he was having on court, the practice sets he’d been playing against other top players. Nadal said that this tournament was magical for him, and was asked if the magic here made his body feel better. “No, unfortunately not,” he said with a laugh. “Is not that magic.”