Rafael Nadal Loses His Serve and His Way at the U.S. Open

But he worked his way into the Australian Open and rallied from a two-set deficit to defeat Daniil Medvedev in a 5 hour 24 minute test of endurance and resilience in the final.

“If we put everything together, the scenario, the momentum, what it means,” he said in Melbourne, long after midnight, “yeah, without a doubt probably have been the biggest comeback of my tennis career.”

He kept rolling, winning 20 straight matches in all before sustaining a freak injury in March in the semifinals of the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., on a blustery afternoon against a much younger Spanish star, Carlos Alcaraz.

In an intense, physical duel in which last-second swing adjustments were often necessary in the high winds, Nadal sustained a stress fracture in his rib cage. Though he somehow reached the final, losing to Taylor Fritz, the new injury cut short his preparation for his beloved clay-court season.

When he returned, his foot pain resurfaced. After losing to Denis Shapovalov at the Italian Open in mid-May, he looked as gloomy as he had ever looked in the aftermath of a defeat, talking openly and grimly about the prospect of tennis no longer being worth the trouble or the pain.

But after mulling retirement for the second time in a year, Nadal found a way — with the help of regular painkilling injections — to win his 14th French Open. Then he found a way to resolve the pain on a longer-term basis by undergoing a procedure in which radio waves were used to deaden the nerves in his foot before Wimbledon.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/05/sports/tennis/nadal-tiafoe-us-open.html