Rafael Nadal has finished his tennis year 2018 before the ATP season final in London. The fact that his much criticized exhibition match in Saudi Arabia will probably not take place with it, shouldn’t bother him much.
Rafael Nadal has won pretty much everything there is to win in tennis. The title at the ATP season finale, at which the eight best athletes vote for their best every year, is not one of them. This will not change in 2018 either, as the Spaniard cancelled his participation a few days before the start of the ATP Finals in London. The knee, of course, plus a free floating joint body in the ankle, which required a successful surgery on Tuesday.
It is the continuation of the almost endless tale of suffering of Rafael Nadal, who dropped out of school as a 15-year-old in 2001 to become a tennis professional, and who is today at 32 almost a physical wreck. “You can’t fight age or clock,” the Spaniard ambiguously said, “It’s ticking and ticking and you can’t stop its hands.”
It seems she’s ticking a little faster for Nadal and his exhausting game. Once again, the eleven-time French Open winner is missing at the season finale, and his beefy body regularly goes on strike at the end of a year. In 2005 (foot and knee), 2008 (general exhaustion), 2012 (knee), 2014 (appendix) and 2016 (wrist) he dropped out early, in 2017 he dropped out after a defeat in the first group match against David Goffin due to knee pain. The patellar tendons in both knees are chronically inflamed, Nadal is never really free of symptoms.
Last week Nadal had already cancelled the Masters in Paris due to an abdominal muscle injury, so he lost the lead in the world rankings to the Serbian Novak Djokovic. “Since my abdominal muscle is still causing me problems, we have now used this time for the additional operation of the ankle,” said the world runner-up: “In this way I hope that I will be fit again for the next season.
And maybe, but only maybe, Nadal is not so unhappy with the current situation. On the 22nd of December he was supposed to take part in the much criticized show fight with Djokovic in Saudi Arabia, from this number he is probably out now – without any background noise. His statements from last week when he said about Saudi Arabia sound almost cryptic: “The situation is currently being assessed by my advisors. Then we will look for solutions together.”
Despite his eleventh title in Roland Garros, his personal record for the 2018 season is rather mixed. “It’s been a complicated year. It was a very good one if I could play tennis. But it was a very bad one regarding the injuries,” Nadal said. So that 2019 will be a really good one, he now wants to gather strength and really get going again in January in the Australian summer. Nadal left it open whether it would be enough again for the really big moments: “At a certain age the hands of the clock no longer tick for you, you can only try to keep up with its speed.”