Nadal and Djokovic say goodbye forever… and no, there will be no crying

Rafa Nadal will play this Saturday one of the last big games that remain to be played before hanging up the racket. A few weeks ago, he confirmed what was an open secret: when 2024 ends, he will retire from active sport. It will be the Davis Cup where he will play for the last time, a tournament in which he will wear the Spanish National Team shirt to try to say goodbye in the best possible way. And, while that moment arrives, the sooner you will have his last great duel against Novak Djokovic.

Over the past two decades, three tennis players have dominated the sporting landscape. Rafa Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic lived a rivalry rarely seen in sport. Any specialty has heroes and villains, protagonists and antagonists who are loved by some and reviled by others. But the three best tennis players in history have coincided in the same generation has given rise to legendary confrontations that will be remembered the whole story.

It was in 2022, when everything broke. Federer was the first to announce his retirement and, with this, an historic era came to an end. The Swiss chose the Laver Cup as a tournament to say goodbye, to which none of the great tennis players missed the event. The finishing touch was the doubles match between Nadal and Federer: That emotional moment, the last of the Swiss, will be remembered forever. As much as the tears that Federer and Nadal they poured as they linked their hands in the emotional farewell.

Two years later, It’s Nadal’s turnwhich has been making its well-deserved round of farewells all season. Barcelona, ​​Madrid, Roland Garros and the Olympic Games will no longer see the best Spanish athlete in history. And, before his final farewell in Malaga, fate had an unexpected guided twist in store for him: a match against Djokovic at the Six Kings Slam which, although it is for exhibition, will be the last of two greats in the history of tennis. And there will be no tears this time.

The victory of Jannik Sinner over the Serbian and of Alcaraz over the Balearic Islands caused a final confrontation between the two in Saudi Arabia. It will be an exciting match, in which two players who have fought arm in arm for two decades, against each other, They will face each other in one last twist of the script that will allow sports lovers to enjoy the last notch of a great rivalry… that It never turned into a friendship.as happened with Federer.

Nadal and Djokovic are two winners, one of those who they never give up and to whom defeat is not too familiar. But both have a very different way of approaching the sport: for the Spaniard, not everything involves winning at all costs, while the Serbian is a player who does not know how to tolerate the frustration of losing. And, in fact, Absent understand that They could never have been friends with Nadalsince he was the main rival he had to beat to enter history.

It was Djokovic himself who made the feeling between the two clear in an interview in Corriere della Sera: “At first, we were going to have dinner together, but, even with Nadal, friendship is impossible. We have never been friends, because between rivals you cannotbut we have not been enemies either. “At the beginning of my career, when he kicked my ass on the court, I knew my limitations. But when I started winning games, everything changed,” he expressed.

Not long ago, Nadal also talked about Absent in Movistar+: “I don’t feel anything when I see Djokovic win. I think it would have been frustrating for him not to be the player with the most titles.. And perhaps that is why he has achieved it, he has taken his ambition to the maximum. And I have had it too, but healthy,” he expressed. This Saturday, after two decades of confrontations, The final point of one of the great rivalries in sport has arrived. Can they be friends from now on?

Rafa Nadal will play this Saturday one of the last big games that remain to be played before hanging up the racket. A few weeks ago, he confirmed what was an open secret: when 2024 ends, he will retire from active sport. It will be the Davis Cup where he will play for the last time, a tournament in which he will wear the Spanish National Team shirt to try to say goodbye in the best possible way. And, while that moment arrives, the sooner you will have his last great duel against Novak Djokovic.

Over the past two decades, three tennis players have dominated the sporting landscape. Rafa Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic lived a rivalry rarely seen in sport. Any specialty has heroes and villains, protagonists and antagonists who are loved by some and reviled by others. But the three best tennis players in history have coincided in the same generation has given rise to legendary confrontations that will be remembered the whole story.