THREAD 🧵

ONE YEAR AGO TODAY, a sporting legend, Roger Federer, retires.

In fitting fashion, the Swiss legend chooses his biggest rival, Rafael Nadal, to play alongside him in a doubles match, to conclude his career.

Rafa was one of the very first people Roger told of his plans to retire, right after his family and team. 🥹
While Roger and Rafa were both far from their best, with the former having the knee issues which caused him to retire, and the latter with abdominal issues that had plagued him for a few months, they still produced some magic, one last time.

Federer even hit the ball BETWEEN the net post and the net (somehow?!).

🧵THREAD: The ULTIMATE lesson of never giving up, going beyond the pain barrier, pushing when your body says stop, by Rafael Nadal, at the 2009 Australian Open:

“[During the semi-final] In the very last game, just before the very last point, my eyes filled with tears. I wasn’t crying because I sensed defeat, or even victory, but as a response to the sheer excruciating tension of it all. I had lost the fourth set on a tie break, and that, in a game so tense and in such conditions, would have been devastating had I not been able to call on every last reserve of mental strength I’d accumulated over fifteen years of relentless competition. I was able to put that blow behind me and begin the fifth believing I still had it in me to win.

The chance finally arrived with me 5–4 and 0–40 up on Verdasco’s serve. That should have been it, with three match points, but it wasn’t quite. I lost both the first and the second points. That was when it all got too much for me and I broke down; that was where the armor plating fell away and the warrior Rafa Nadal, who tennis fans think they know, lay revealed as the vulnerable, human Rafael. The one person who didn’t see it was Verdasco. Either that or he was in even worse shape than I was. Because his nerves got the better of him too. In a moment of incredible good luck for me (and terrible luck for him), he double faulted, handing me victory without me having to hit a shot. Both of us fell flat on our backs, ready to expire of physical and nervous exhaustion, but it was me who made it up first, stumbling forward and stepping over the net to embrace Fernando and tell him it was a match neither of us had deserved to lose. Toni, who had not failed to notice the quivering wreck I’d been reduced to in the final game, remarked later that had Verdasco not double faulted, the semifinal would probably have been his. I tend to agree.”

He was into the final against Roger Federer, after a 5 hour 14 minutes marathon semi-final. (1/4) “I went to sleep that night in the grimmest of moods and woke up the next morning feeling only marginally less stiff. When I went out on the practice court for my last training session at five in the afternoon, two and a half hours before the match was due to start, I hardly felt any better. Again, I felt dizzy; again, my leg muscles felt heavy and hard— so much so that I suddenly had an attack of cramps in one of my calves. Toni was there, and after half an hour struggling to get some rhythm going, I told him I couldn’t go on. I must have looked terrible because he said, “OK. Stop. Let’s go back to the locker room.” ‘And there it was that Toni rose to the occasion’. (2/4)