Rafael Nadal has announced that he will “probably” retire next year and confirmed his withdrawal from the French Open after coming up short in his four-month battle to recover from a hip injury.
Nadal said he intends to take a complete break from the game to heal his injury-ravaged body, ruling him out of Wimbledon and, in all likelihood, the US Open. The 36-year-old has not played since tearing his psoas muscle during a defeat to Mackenzie McDonald at the Australian Open in January.
Nadal’s absence from a grand slam event he has won a record 14 times seemed inevitable from the moment he called a press conference at his academy in Mallorca on Thursday. But barely had it sunk in that the Spaniard’s name would be missing from the draw sheet in Paris for the first time in 19 years before he began to talk of how training in constant pain had diminished his enjoyment of the game.
“I was working as much as possible every single day for the last four months,” said Nadal. “It has been very difficult because we were not able to find the solution to the problem that I had in Australia.
“Today I am still in the position that I’m not able to feel myself ready to compete to the standards that I made to play at Roland Garros. I’m not going to be the guy that’s going to just try to be there and put myself in a position that I don’t like to be in.
“After a couple of years, of course the results have been very positive because I was able to win a couple of grand slams and another couple of important tournaments. The real situation is I was not able to enjoy my daily work. Since the pandemic, my body wasn’t able to hold the practices and to hold the daily work in a good way.
“I was not able to enjoy because there was too many problems, too many times having to stop for physical issues and too many days of going here practising with too much pain. I said that I need to stop for a while. I don’t know when I am going to be able to come back to the practice court, but I want to stop for a while, maybe two to four months.”
In the past year and a half alone, Nadal has been beset by one serious injury after another. He returned from a chronic foot problem that threatened to end his career to win the 2022 Australian Open, and went on to win the French Open six months later after bouncing back from a cracked rib sustained in Indian Wells. But his victory at Roland Garros, which earned him a record 22nd grand slam title, came at the price of daily painkilling injections in his foot, forcing him to seek a more workable solution.
No sooner had Nadal undergone a procedure to deaden nerve tissue in his foot, however, than he suffered a torn abdominal muscle and was forced to withdraw from his Wimbledon semi-final against Nick Kyrgios. He suffered a recurrence of the problem at the US Open, where he was defeated in the fourth round by Frances Tiafoe, and was still struggling with the problem at the season-ending ATP Finals in Turin, where he failed to navigate the group stage. In the circumstances, it is no wonder Nadal said he was “mentally destroyed” after injuring his hip at Melbourne Park.
“My ambition is to stop to give myself an opportunity to enjoy next year, which is probably going to be my last year on the professional tour,” said Nadal. “That’s my idea, even though I can’t say 100% that it is going to be like this, because you never know what can happen. But my idea and my motivation is to try to say goodbye to all of the tournaments that have been important for me and my tennis career.
“I really believe that if I keep going now, I will not be able to make that happen. I don’t know that I will be able to but I think the chances are much higher if I stop.”
Nadal’s withdrawal from Roland Garros, the tournament that has defined his career more than any other, follows a series of increasingly gloomy progress updates about his recovery on social media. When he pulled out of Monte Carlo in early April stating that he was “not yet ready to compete at the highest level”, the 22-time grand slam champion added that he hoped to return soon. Ten days later, Nadal said he was “still not ready” and would miss the Barcelona Open.
But it was the video message that accompanied news of his withdrawal from the Madrid Masters, in which he revealed that the injury had not responded to treatment, that really set alarm bells ringing.
“The injury still hasn’t healed, and I can’t work out what I need to compete,” said Nadal, adding that he would undergo further treatment.
That treatment clearly failed, and Nadal has now acknowledged that only a complete break from the game will give him the possibility of enjoying the farewell tour he craves in 2024.