at the end of the Australian Open that consecrated him as the maximum winner of Grand Slam tournaments in history, Rafael Nadal He showed his tenacity. At 35, he battled for almost five and a half hours against the Russian Daniil Medvedev, number two in the ranking and a decade younger than the Spaniard, to win a title that undoubtedly places him among the greatest of all time in world sport.
That sacrifice and that winning spirit that the man born in Mallorca realized is the product of a training he received since he was very young. Proof of this is the video that went viral on social networks once Rafa sealed his victory in Melbourne. The fragment of just 19 seconds shows some statements he made at the age of 14 and with which he made it clear what the bases of his current success are.
“Now what do you plan to do?” Was the question that the journalist asked little Nadal after winning Les Petis As in 2000, an international tournament that brings together young people between 12 and 14 years old in Tarbes, France, and whose winners include tennis players of the stature of the Spanish Juan Carlos Ferrero, the Frenchman Richard Gasquet, the American Frances Tiafoe, the Russian Anna Kournikova, the Swiss Martina Hingis or the Belgian Kim Clijsters.
The answer made it clear that since he was a child they instilled in the Spaniard the culture of work in order to reach the top: “Keep training. It’s important to win this tournament but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be very good. We have to keep training.”
It is worth noting that Rafa He was born into a family of athletes, since two of his uncles were professionals. Miguel Ángel Nadal was a footballer for FC Barcelona and Mallorca, while Toni Nadal was a tennis player and his nephew’s coach for most of his career, since they worked together from their beginnings until 2017.
That thought of the 14-year-old Rafa is transferred to the present. In an interview he gave to the newspapers As in Spain and L’Equipe in France after winning in Australia, he said: “I thought that maybe it would be difficult to play again. Because I was working without seeing any positive evolution in my foot, with many days of frustration and difficult moments with the team. Also conversations with my family without seeing a viable way forward. But little by little things got better, the treatments had their effect a little bit. We already know that what I have has no solution, but at least I had to try to find something that would allow me to play. And these three weeks have allowed me to do it, something that for me is incredible”.
The ailment that afflicts the manacorí is located in the scaphoid (located at the apex of the internal arch and an essential part of the skeleton of the foot) and is chronic. “When you have the illusion of continuing and making an effort daily as I have done during all these months, you have the illusion of coming back and feeling like a player, professional and competitive. For me obviously Winning the tournament was incredible, but I think seeing myself really competitive and again a professional tennis player, being able to train and fight with the best makes that feeling just as beautiful as winning the title”, he stressed.
After winning that tournament at age 14, Nadal’s career began to take leaps and bounds. He was a semifinalist in 2002 at Wimbledon in the junior category, despite playing against opponents older than him and, that same year, he played his first match as a professional in the Mallorca International Series, just over a month before turning 16. Spaniard, who won a total of 90 titles throughout his career (the first was in Sopot 2004), has great milestones in his successful sporting career, which this Sunday was crowned with the 21st Grand Slam title.
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