Rafael Nadal's tennis evolution into an all-time great: 'Every year he improved a little'

It was not a fairytale ending for Rafael Nadal, but to understand how he is adored in his home country and beyond, one only had to listen to the noise. More than 10,000 people roared Nadal through point after point of his 6-4, 6-4 defeat to Botic van de Zandschulp at the Palacio de Deportes Jose Maria Martin Carpena in Malaga on Tuesday evening. Tennis rarely provides auspicious endings. Everything that came before was more than Nadal ever dared imagine.

Those emotional scenes in Spain ended a 23-year career that delivered 22 Grand Slams, 92 ATP Tour titles, 2 Olympic gold medals, 1,307 ATP Tour matches, 1,080 wins and a level of unimaginable adulation for one of the greatest tennis players and sportspeople in history.

Over the last six months, The Athletic has spoken to his rivals — including Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray — his coaches, such as uncle Toni, and his confidants to help understand how the shy clay-court specialist from Manacor, on the island of Mallorca, evolved into an all-time great and all-court master whom Djokovic described as his “greatest rival”.

This is the story of Nadal’s remarkable journey.

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2003-09: ATP Tour arrival and then domination

For the first part of this period, Nadal was almost exclusively a clay-court player. He won the 2005 French Open but didn’t get to the quarterfinals of any of the other Grand Slams.

In the years that followed, Nadal worked to improve his all-court game and his serve, and his results away from clay improved. He missed the Australian Open in 2006 but won his second Roland Garros title before reaching that year’s Wimbledon final and U.S. Open quarters. Roger Federer schooled him on Centre Court, winning the first set 6-0.

The 2007 Wimbledon final was a lot closer, going all the way to a decider. Then came 2008…

Toni Nadal started coaching Rafael when his nephew was three years old. He was there when Nadal opted to play left-handed despite being a natural rightie, telling him that his initial way of playing with two hands on both sides would never work at professional level.

“Since he was young I saw that he could be a very good tennis player. We have very high goals. To be No. 1 or win Grand Slams,’” Toni said in a phone interview.

“Always, since he was young, the most important goal was to improve because this is what makes the difference between the players.”

Improvement, evolution and adaptation are the hallmarks of Nadal’s career, according to those who played against Nadal or followed his career closely.

“He showed more improvement than any player I’ve ever seen,” seven-time Grand Slam champion John McEnroe told The Athletic in the summer. Speaking from the Rafa Nadal Academy in Mallorca in August, former U.S. Open winner Marin Cilic, who played Nadal nine times between 2009 and 2019, said: “He was continuously working on his game. Roger as well. Novak as well, and Andy. But the most visible was Rafa, trying to continuously play better and better.”

Nadal, 15, started his career with a Futures match in 2001. He was viewed as a clay-courter, the assumption being that, like many of his compatriots, he would be a threat at the French Open but not a factor at the other Grand Slams on hard courts or grass.

Nadal started playing Challengers (the tier below the main ATP Tour) towards the end of 2002; he joined the main tour the following year. “At Challenger level, he played with good technical skill, but on the ATP Tour he was playing against the best players in the world,” said Toni.

“He started to hit the ball a bit late, but then every year he improved a little.”

His serve was a particular weakness relative to the rest of his shots. When he won the Davis Cup with Spain in 2004 and his first French Open in 2005, he was regularly hitting first serves at around 110mph (177kmh) but could compensate for winning fewer free points behind it with his forehand.

Murray’s first meeting with Nadal was a fourth-round match at the Australian Open in 2007, which the Spaniard won in five sets.

“He definitely started hitting his second serve significantly harder than he was at the beginning of his career,” Murray, who ended his career with three Grand Slam titles, told The Athletic in June when asked to remember that first match and how Nadal’s game changed.

“He sort of used it to start the point. I think that’s probably the shot that I noticed the biggest change in during his career. He certainly tried to shorten points more as his career progressed.”

In the space of a year, Nadal improved his second-serve points won from 56 percent in 2007 to a significantly-higher 60 percent the following year, which was when he made his Wimbledon breakthrough. His percentage of service games won jumped from 85.9 per cent in 2007 to 88.1 per cent in 2008.

Toni said this stemmed from being naturally right-handed. “He sometimes hit the ball not so high and then was a little stiff with his arm and his wrist,” he said.

“He tried to play a little softer with his wrist and then he improved a little.” Even as his serve got a lot better it was still the weakest part of his game, relative to the quality of everything else.

James Blake, the American former world No. 4, played Nadal for the first time in the fourth round at the 2005 U.S. Open, a few months after the then 19-year-old Nadal had won his first French Open title.

“I was expecting him to be more of a clay-courter, just kind of looping balls back in,” said Blake. “And then, the first forehand he hit in the warm-up, he absolutely rifled it. I won my first few times against him, but knew he was special.

After those first three meetings that Blake won between 2005 and 2006, the pair met again in March 2008 at Indian Wells. Nadal had by then reached two Wimbledon finals and was developing into a genuine all-court player. Blake described the change as going from playing a clay-courter on a hard court to playing someone comfortable across surfaces —”he’d figured out how to go through the court a lot more and played way more aggressively” — as well as emphasizing Nadal’s improved volleys.

“He didn’t just rest on winning the French Open. He won that and thought, ‘OK, how do I get better to win the U.S. Open, to win Wimbledon?’”

After losing the 2007 Wimbledon final, Nadal wept and thought to himself: “I never want to feel this way again.”

Nadal beat Blake in three sets in both Indian Wells and Miami. A few months later, he won the French Open again and that breakthrough first Wimbledon, ending Federer’s run of five straight titles in a match that some consider to be the best men’s tennis match of all time. It also showcased the new champion’s evolution, with Nadal pointing to his slice backhand as evidence of this in his 2011 autobiography Rafa: My Story.

“A backhand slice, cross-court defeated his lunge at the net,” Nadal wrote of a shot that took him to set point in the second set.

“That was especially satisfying. The backhand slice was an element of my game I’d been working on strengthening for some time.”

Placing that match in historical context, McEnroe said: “Tough to say peak Rafa Nadal but the 2008 Wimbledon final was maybe the best match I saw at Wimbledon.”

Others believe that Nadal never surpassed the level of his 6-1, 6-3, 6-0 evisceration of a Federer in his pomp in the 2008 French Open final. “That was absolutely ridiculous tennis,” said Cilic. “He didn’t drop a set and was playing (Nicolas) Almagro, (Fernando) Verdasco, Novak, Roger. The final, I mean ridiculous.”

Toni Nadal believes that 2008 — when he won the French Open and Wimbledon — was one of Nadal’s all-career peaks, alongside 2010 when he won three Slams (the French Open, Wimbledon, U.S. Open). But Federer takes a different view. In January 2009, Nadal beat him in a five-set Australian Open final to complete the “surface Slam” of winning a major on grass, hard and clay. During the trophy presentation, a tearful Federer said, “God, this is killing me.”

“I tell friends about that match and say I could have won, maybe should have won, but I felt like there he was properly unreal,” Federer said in an interview this summer.

“In that particular moment, I looked across and thought, ‘Oh my God, this guy is crazy good’.”

The heavy topspin Nadal put on his crosscourt forehand that sent the ball bouncing up to shoulder height was kryptonite to Federer’s single-handed backhand: The 2009 win in Melbourne gave Nadal a 13-6 head-to-head lead against his biggest rival.

Nadal by this point appeared almost unbeatable. He had improved his serve and volleys, developed his backhand, and was arguably at his physical peak in a career that would come to be defined by injury. His locker-room aura, even at such a young age, was unmistakable.

“I saw someone who was very shy towards the crowd and the media but was completely the opposite behaving when he was in the locker room,” his publicist Benito Perez-Barbadillo said in a phone interview last week.

“I would see some young players with their heads down, especially with all these big stars, but Nadal wouldn’t care. He’d be there jumping around, he never stopped moving,” he said.

2009 marked the end of the first iteration of Nadal. After his first-ever loss at Roland Garros to Robin Soderling, he missed Wimbledon with a torn patellar tendon in his left knee. Nadal was back for the U.S. Open but Juan Martin del Potro hammered him 6-2, 6-2, 6-2 in the semifinals. By the end of the year, it felt like Nadal was losing some of his aura.

He responded with the most successful of his career.

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2010-14: Battle with Djokovic for supremacy

Nadal recovered from 2009 to win three of the four majors for the only time in 2010.

In 2011, Djokovic emerged to win all of the majors apart from the French Open and Nadal’s next serious rival had arrived. Nadal wouldn’t lose at Roland Garros until 2015, but he didn’t win a major away from clay until the 2013 U.S. Open, beating Djokovic in the final.

Nadal has not beaten Djokovic nor even taken a set off him on a hard court since. But in 2013 Nadal mastered the surface like never before, doing the Canadian Open/Cincinnati Open/U.S. Open triple for the only time in his career.

In 2014, injury ruled Nadal out of the entire U.S. hard-court swing, meaning he couldn’t defend any of those titles. Earlier in the year, he won a ninth French Open title, his last major for three years…

The first iteration of Nadal could camp in the deuce side of the court and run around his backhand to unleash his forehand all day. After 2009, his more restricted movement forced him to improve his backhand more than he already had. By the 2013 U.S. Open final against Djokovic, Nadal was surprising his opponent by taking backhands early.

Djokovic, who like Federer had his heart broken in Paris so often by Nadal, reflected on this change at this year’s French Open.

“He was probably conscious of the physical struggles that he had, and he had to be more aggressive on the court,” he said at a news conference when asked by The Athletic at what point Nadal peaked.

“I think he did very well with the backhand particularly. The pattern against Rafa was always trying to find that backhand, get him out of the court and open up the forehand.

“But then he improved so much on that backhand and court positioning that it became impossible to find a weak spot from the baseline to hurt him.”

Jiri Novak, who played Nadal three times between 2004 and 2006 and inflicted his first and, until Tuesday, only singles defeat at the Davis Cup, told The Athletic recently that in those early years, “The quality of his game was already on the high level, but his backhand was still not that good.”

Toni knew the backhand was an issue from the beginning: “We had some problems with the backhand crosscourt because many times when he opened the court the next shot would go a little too much in the middle. But then he improved this shot.”

The relative backhand weakness was also partly by design. Toni would tell a young Nadal only to hit backhands as a last resort.

“I said, ‘Don’t hit more than three balls in a row with your backhand because when we do that, we have more problems. Our game will not be so aggressive. You have to change your direction to move a little more.’

“Then there was a moment when he improved the backhand. Everything changed.”

According to Perez-Barbadillo, opponents would use Nadal’s backhand as a harbinger of their fate. If it was firing, he could feel borderline unbeatable.

Between 2010 and 2014, Djokovic and Nadal won 14 of the 20 available Grand Slams and played some of their most memorable matches. Djokovic points to the epic 2013 French Open semifinal, which Nadal won 9-7 in the fifth, and the 2012 Australian Open final which lasted five hours and 53 minutes.

Just as he always had, Nadal was evolving. He volleyed with more authority than ever, winning Olympic Gold in doubles at the 2016 Olympics with Marc Lopez. Using the net was another way to shorten points.

“He would have a break of two months and suddenly he would have a new serve, a new forehand,” Cilic said.

“It just shows how great of a mind he was, to think that he won all the Grand Slams but still can improve.”

“By his late twenties, early thirties, he became one of the best, if not the best, volleyers on the tour,” McEnroe added.

Casper Ruud, who Nadal thrashed in the 2022 French Open final, grew up idolising the Spaniard. He is relieved he didn’t have to play his hero in his prime.

“I just feel bad for the guys who had to do it,” Ruud said in an interview in Rome.

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2015-16: Decline

This was the worst period of Nadal’s career, where his confidence and forehand deserted him. He didn’t win a major for two years, not even reaching a quarterfinal in 2016. A nagging wrist injury then ended his season early. He was in the doldrums…

“I am playing a little bit anxious,” he said in a news conference after losing in the 2015 Miami Open third round to Fernando Verdasco.

Two months earlier, Tomas Berdych beat Nadal in the Australian Open quarterfinals, moving their head-to-head from 17-0 to 17-1. Nadal had only dropped two sets in those 17 matches; Berdych beat him in straight sets, taking the first two 6-2, 6-0.

Djokovic hammered Nadal 7-5, 6-3, 6-1 at Roland Garros — his second-ever defeat there — and a month later world No. 102 Dustin Brown beat him in four sets at Wimbledon. Nadal double-faulted at crucial moments, and afterwards Tim Henman told the BBC : “When you have won 14 Grand Slams and 60-odd tour titles, it amazes me how fragile Rafael Nadal’s confidence is.”

“He had personal things that gave him some disturbance,” Perez-Barbadillo said. He did not elaborate on their nature, but Toni added that his physical problems drained his confidence.

Whatever the underlying cause, Nadal’s struggles on the court continued into the following year.

In February 2016, after exiting the Australian Open in the first round to Verdasco, one of his coaches Francisco Roig told Spanish publication El Confidencial: “The way to win at this moment is changing. He needs to be more aggressive, hit before the ball.

“He is struggling to make damage with his forehand. He knows it, he is trying to do it in every match, but it’s not easy.”

He was speaking about the greatest baseliner in men’s tennis history, alongside Djokovic.

All Nadal’s struggles crystallized in his final Grand Slam match of 2016, a five-set defeat in the fourth round to the up-and-coming Lucas Pouille at the U.S. Open.

He had withdrawn from the French Open mid-tournament with a wrist injury that also forced him out of Wimbledon. Against Pouille, Nadal said he felt physically and mentally better but missed a regulation forehand that would have given him match point in the deciding tiebreak. He went match point down, and was out the next point.

In what was their final end-of-season review meeting, Toni said to Nadal: “You can’t run like before, you can’t be four hours on court, you have to be more aggressive, play shorter points. You have to go more to the net.”

Toni says Nadal always had a “very good volley” — it was just about using it a bit more.

“I need something else, I need something more that was not there today. I’m going to keep working to try to find,” Nadal himself said in his news conference after losing to Pouille.

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How Rafael Nadal will leave tennis

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20 17-19: Rebirth, Federer turns the tables

That “something else” was fellow Mallorcan and former world No. 1 Carlos Moya, who joined Nadal’s coaching team towards the end of 2016. Nadal returned from injury in time for the 2017 Australian Open, losing to Federer in the final, and the duo split the four Grand Slams that year. Nadal won the French Open and U.S. Open to end that three-year major drought.

Elsewhere, his rivalry with Federer took another twist, and the most important shot in tennis — but not his best — reached new heights…

“Everything changed,” Toni said of the 2017 season.

Nadal added more lead tape to his racket to get a bit more power — Toni’s idea — and started a nutrition programme to get him back to his muscle-bound early days. Moya pushed Nadal to up his second-serve speed, to make it less predictable.

His locker-room aura, which had dissipated with those losses to emerging players like Pouille, returned.

It consumed the-then 21-year-old Karen Khachanov on Centre Court. On the back of reaching the French Open fourth round and being tipped for big things, he walked into a drubbing from Nadal in the fourth round at Wimbledon.

“He won the first set 6-1 and I just thought, ‘What am I doing here?’” Khachanov said in an interview in May when asked about Nadal’s peak.

Nadal also had the self-awareness to discuss the changes. “During your career, of course you lose things,” he said in a news conference in Shanghai.

“You need to act on other things to keep being competitive.”

Nadal ended up losing the Shanghai final to Federer, and the only downside in a restorative year was a reversal in their rivalry. Nadal led the head-to-head 23-10 coming into 2017 but lost four times to his great rival. Federer’s own evolution, most notably a remodelled backhand with a shorter swing, was decisive.

Toni left Nadal’s coaching team at the end of the year. Moya made further tweaks to Nadal’s strategies, pioneering the deep return position that has become a feature of modern tennis. Going into the 2018 French Open, Nadal posted a career-high figure of 85 per cent of returns landing beyond the service box (according to Game Insight Group) and duly won an 11th Roland Garros title. He won 36.9 percent of return games in 2017, a significant jump from 32.9 per cent the previous year and the third-highest annual figure of his career.

By 2018, the fabled “next gen” and predicted Big Three slayers were picking up wins. Two of them, Alexander Zverev and Stefanos Tsitsipas, couldn’t believe Nadal’s level at this point.

“That year was a joke,” Zverev said in an interview in May. He faced Nadal at the Davis Cup in Valencia. After hammering David Ferrer in his first match, he felt he had a chance.

Nadal won the match 6-1, 6-4, 6-4.

“I had absolutely no chance at all,” Zverev said. “I just thought, ‘That’s a player who’s just come back from injury’. I wish I could do that.”

A few weeks earlier, Nadal had beaten Tsitsipas in the Barcelona Open final.

“I felt like there was literally nothing I could have done that day,” Tsitsipas said in a recent interview of the 6-2, 6-1 defeat he suffered on the court that had been renamed the Pista Rafa Nadal a year earlier.

“That is something I’d never felt in the past. When I played against him, how good I play didn’t guarantee anything. From that first meeting I was really impressed by the level and the IQ he’d brought out on the court.”

This tennis IQ is something that Perez-Barbadillo believes is underrated, along with Nadal’s shotmaking ability.

Another knee injury put him out of the 2018 U.S. Open, forcing him to retire from his semifinal against Del Potro. An abdominal issue and then an operation on his ankle meant he didn’t play for the rest of the year, but the absence gave him time to work on his serve, making good on Cilic’s claim about his use of breaks above.

The flattened-out serve was the talk of the 2019 Australian Open. After thrashing Berdych for the loss of seven games in the fourth round (quite the turnaround from his defeat four years earlier) Nadal said, “It’s like every day we’re creating a story about the serve, no?

“I talked enough about the serve.”

Going into the Australian Open final, which Nadal lost heavily to Djokovic, he hadn’t been broken since the first round. He was averaging 6.5 aces per match, with his career average at the time 2.9. His six matches before the final ran an average of two hours, two minutes, unheard of for the former master of the epic.

“I’ve been practising during the off season, the serve and the first shot. That’s giving me a lot of free points and that’s so important at this stage in my career,” he said in a news conference after reaching the semifinal.

It would be the loss of these free points that would define Nadal’s endgame and bring his career to an end.

Nadal ended 2019 with two more Grand Slams: a 12th French Open and a fourth U.S. Open — one of his more underrated records — but it was his serve improvements that stood out.

The improvement on his serve was underlined by him recording his highest-ever percentage for service games won (90.8 per cent). And proving Moya’s point about the need to go for more with his first serve rather than playing it safe, Nadal’s first serve percentage dropped slightly to 64.8 per cent (from 65.6 the previous year) but his first serve points won percentage went way up to 76.4, from 71.7 in 2018. A career high, and a huge jump from 68.5 per cent in 2016, the last season before Moya came on board. It all contributed to Nadal’s joint-most consistent year at the slams (two wins, a final and a semi), and saw him secure the world No. 1 spot for the final time that November.

Dominic Thiem emerged as a genuine threat to Nadal in this period, winning five of their 12 meetings between 2017 and 2020. When it mattered most, Nadal had the edge, winning the 2018 and 2019 French Open finals.

“The best version of Rafa I faced was the French Open final in 2019,” Thiem told The Athletic in August. Nadal’s improved serve helped him dictate points from the jump, limiting Thiem’s planned desire to take the initiative himself.

He won the U.S. Open against a 23-year-old Daniil Medvedev, playing in his first major final. Nadal won in five sets against the Russian, who won just one of his six matches against Nadal.

Nadal respected Medvedev’s greater baseline durability by approaching the net 66 times, including 20 serve-and-volley points of which he won 17. It was the culmination of Nadal’s evolution in this era: shortening points both from the baseline with his serve and at the front of the court with his volley.

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2020-24: The last dance and endgame

Even the second-darkest period of Nadal’s career, marked by injury, frustration, and the limitations that would eventually force him to retire brought three Grand Slam titles, a return any tennis player would dream of when they first pick up a racket. He equalled and broke all-time Grand Slam records.

As the end approached, Nadal’s status as a statesman reconfigured his relationship with his fellow players, as well as the tennis world…

By 2020, Nadal’s longevity led to him playing Grand Slam finals against players who had idolised him growing up. His last Grand Slam title came in Paris in 2022 against Ruud, who had been six years old when Nadal won his first French Open title in 2005. Nadal’s opponent in his last Davis Cup match, Van de Zandschulp, was another who hero worshipped him growing up.

“First he takes your legs, then your mind,” Ruud told The Athletic earlier this year.

Two rounds earlier, Nadal beat Djokovic in a four-set classic, gaining revenge for losing in the 2021 semifinals.

“He has been the greatest rival that I ever had,” Djokovic said of Nadal in a news conference when asked about his career.

“Matches against him on clay have frustrated me so much but they also made me a better player, made me understand what it takes to try to surpass him, especially at Roland Garros.

“It’s the highest mountain to climb,” he said.

Nadal won that last French Open on a numbed left foot, and from then on injuries finally defeated him. He pulled out of his Wimbledon semifinal against Kyrgios with a torn abdominal muscle and didn’t look fully fit a couple of months later when he lost to Frances Tiafoe in the fourth round of the U.S. Open.

“He might have lost a step,” Tiafoe said in a recent interview.

Tennis was changing all around him. Federer retired with their famous farewell doubles match at the 2022 Laver Cup as new stars like Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner emerged. Alcaraz won the 2022 U.S. Open and beat Nadal for the first time in three meetings in Madrid four months earlier, beating Djokovic in the very next match for the title. At a news conference at the 2024 Laver Cup in September, Alcaraz told The Athletic that playing his hero was “a privilege” and also “kind of a nightmare”.

A hip injury restricted Nadal’s 2023 to just two events, and further injuries limited his 2024 campaign to 16 matches, all on clay. He never looked fully fit, losing his 116th and final match at Roland Garros to Zverev in straight sets. Djokovic hammered him at the same venue in the Olympics a couple of months later and in October Nadal announced that he would retire at the Davis Cup.

Looking back at Nadal’s career as a whole, the truly remarkable thing is that, as much as things changed, the core of him stayed the same: the intensity, the ability to take every match point by point, the ferocious will to win.

As Gael Monfils, who lost 14 of his 16 matches against Nadal between 2005 and 2019, put it in an interview earlier this year: “When you step on the court with Rafa, there’s not that much different from one year to the next. Prime Rafa and not prime Rafa are not so different.”

Toni and his three-year-old nephew Rafael spoke from the very start about the constant need for improvement. More than 30 years and 22 Grand Slam titles on, and with Nadal roared on by an adoring crowd in Malaga, Nadal never really stopped, even when he had to do it.

(Top photos: Getty Images; Design: Dan Goldfarb)