“I wanted to show myself that I won by chance”

Seven days. That is the time left for Rafa Nadal to play the last tournament as a professional player of his career. It is the perfect icing on the cake to a career full of success, since the Davis Cup is one of the events for which the Balearic Islands have always shown the most affection. Wear the Spain shirt to hang up your racket and, why not, fight to raise a new one Salad bowlit will be the last challenge of a player who, if he has been characterized by something, is by his competitiveness.

Not too long ago, Nadal expressed evidence: “My body doesn’t respond to me the way I need it to.”. What Nadal was trying to explain was that his head is still competitive, but that his physique does not allow him to perform with the demands that he demands of himself. This hinders him, because not only does it prevent him from reaching balls or finishing plays with the solvency that he did before, but it even you are not able to train at the level you would like. And it hurts to stop seeing yourself as the fighter you are.

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Thus, a few hours before what will be the last official tournament of the best Spanish athlete of all time, many athletes have already begun to say goodbye to him. Tennis will be orphaned without Nadalsince his goodbye leaves Novak Djokovic as the last representative of the best trio in the history of the racket. And many players begin to remember anecdotes about the manacorí, an irreducible player who was always a fighter on the court…even when he was just training.

A few months ago, a contemporary of Nadal also announced his retirement. The Uruguayan Pablo Cuevashampered by injuries, was forced to leave tennis after winning 15 ATP tournaments throughout his career. Shortly after his goodbye, Cuevas offered an interview in The Country of Uruguay to reveal what his new life was like, what his tennis career was like and even some little-known anecdotes. One of them, with Nadal as the protagonist.

Cuevas claimed that Nadal was one of the most competitive tennis players he had ever met and not just during matches. Thus, he stated that during a tournament in Hamburg He called him to play a training match after a preparation session. The Chilean beat him and Nadal didn’t quite get it right. So much so that, during the following months, whenever both coincided in the same tournament, He tried to show him that it had been a stroke of luck.

“The first time we trained, in Hamburg, I won the set we played. From there, He invited me to train over the next six months about 25 times.with the intention of winning the set and show me that it had been a coincidence“, confirmed the Uruguayan with a smile on his face. And, furthermore, Cuevas had someone to compare with, since he also practiced numerous times with Roger Federer, a player very different from Nadal in training.

“Rafa’s thing had nothing to do with what was happening with Roger, that you could play ten sets with him and win all ten of them, because He was practicing other things and was not the least bit interested in the result.. Nadal was training that competitive aspect all the time. It didn’t matter how he was hitting her, The number one objective was always to win no matter how much I was practicing something else.“, confessed the Uruguayan during the interview.

The anecdote serves to perfectly illustrate the competitive level of a Nadal who did not like to lose even in training, an athlete who has always surpassed himself thanks to his demands and his ability to never give up. These are the last days to enjoy a player who changed the history of tennis and who can boast of being the best athlete in the history of Spain. And many tennis players have suffered over several decades.