Time continues to rob the old champion of what he loves most. Rafael Nadal loves what he does so much, he finds competing so satisfying, that he has resigned himself to saying goodbye. But just in case, the Chatrier crowd stands up respectfully – also consisting of Novak Djokovic, Carlos Alcaraz and Iga Swiatek – and applauds excitedly at the end of this episode, resolved with the logic assumed beforehand: 6-3, 7-6 (5) and 6-3 for Alexander Zverev, after 3h 05m. Would it have been the last time? Is this goodbye? “Probably,” says the main character, with 14 Musketeer Cups and tons of mysticism behind him, “But I'm not 100% sure.”. The afternoon exudes a farewell scent, nostalgia is breathed on all four sides and he, still childish in spirit, walks into the dressing room after the age has passed, cheering: “I wish they were 28, and not 38…”. He wants to return to the Summer Games in a few months. And leave it up in the air later, we'll see. But “if it's the last time,” he says, “I enjoyed it. “I'm at peace with it.”
From the moment when luck paired him with Zverev, the Spanish tennis player knew that the route could be short. The German, 27 years old and number four in the world, was perhaps the least appealing rival. He was in shape to win Rome. And on the other hand, he regretted not having more time without limitations. “It was of course not the ideal first round,” says Nadal, who had never lost in the first round of Roland Garros and for whom to this day only the Swede Robin Soderling (2009) and the Serbian Djokovic (2015) had been able to defeat in Paris and 2021). Manacor still has tennis to give and give away, which will surely outdo the vast majority of players. But time is a blessed element, something that no one forgives. He arrived without sensations and the premature crossing with the German sealed this short-lived passage through the Bois de Boulogne. Actually a personal victory for him. “It is difficult for me to show a higher level than what I offered today; in this situation, I mean,” he conveys. And he is certainly right.
They are two tennis players with two different speeds and in two very different realities. The fact that Zverev came into the match with a lead of several lengths is evident from the first shots, in which he is already dominating and Nadal is at his mercy. The Spaniard also starts falsely, with three bad touches that open an ugly and inopportune scenario, resulting in a breakthrough. Bad signal to open your mouth: a poorly calibrated drop shot, a double fault and a backhand into the net. The German completes the first gear with an undeniable winner that follows the afternoon route and tilts the terrain, with the slope becoming more and more apparent because the reverse of the legend does not work and the giant, a player who is evolving towards sporting maturity and now reads the action better. Second pauseand even more uphill.
This Zverev has little or preferably nothing to do with those of other times. Complaints, excuses and outbursts disappear from his catalogue, while his tennis gains ground and makes progress by correcting the defects that distorted it; that is, a brittle forehand, the slippage of double faults and a certain clumsiness in movements, especially vertical movements. But above all, the German has rid himself of his laziness and put on a suit full of good arguments. This is how he manages to overcome Nadal's Parisian greatness when the Mallorcan, who is always there no matter what, activates the ancient machine and summons his army of ghosts in the second set. An entire empire on the attack. In other times the situation would have been insurmountable, but not this time. Time and its dictates, which do not forgive.
The old machine
Pacing too much in the first section, the Spaniard goes over the abyss halfway through the second round, in which Zverev has a double option to make it 3-1. Reaction or nothing, concludes Nadal, who avoids the fall and makes a few jumps that evoke that whirlwind with long hair, sleeveless and pirate trousers who stormed into Paris almost twenty years ago, determined to make history. Today's big man finds it difficult to warm up, but in the end he warms up: the eye, the distances, the timing— and responds to his rival's majestic backhand with a driving force deep that saves his neck and leads the game into another area. The force may fail, but the task is not forgotten. For about an hour he refutes, he rebels, he rebels. But there is no return.
From his vantage point and that 1.98 that allows him to make shots full of venom, direction and precision, wherever the ball comes from, Zverev counters, while the crowd appreciates Nadal's heroic and innate instinct to try to overcome the most difficult. circumstances, no matter how much logic says that this time it is very difficult to find an escape. It even serves to end the second set, but it gets stuck. The lack of rhythm and automatisms are noticeable, also the absence of last year – he had not driven on this circuit for two years – and especially the 38 years he will reach. The body, he says, sends him signals from afar, and that also applies to aging. Law of life, no one is exempt. And the one from Hamburg, ten years younger, signs the 5-5 with a blank break and when it counts, he leads the exchanges with determination.
Nadal, strangely, or perhaps not so strangely today, strangely hits two drop shots that perhaps the script didn't call for in the tiebreak, and now pushes what was already complicated towards the utopian. Two sets down, against the ropes, just out of gas and doomed to an immediate and unprecedented departure from Paris, his second home, the determination to hold on to the match tooth and nail elicits applause from the French crowd again and again, which warns the irreducible spirit of forever in the myth that is now slowly coming to an end. Even in tow, already in the back of the third set, the Spaniard celebrates points as on the first day and throws a few wrist shots, a trademark. Honor, heart, soul. From the first to the last kilometer, Nadal competes like Nadal. But there we find Zverev, impeccable, winner, elegant in his speech – thinking first of his opponent – and author of a triumph that, 'maybe yes, maybe no', who knows, could have been the farewell of the hero of his homeland mean. Time and its tyranny.
TERESA SUAREZ (EFE)
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