Wimbledon 2008, Nadal’s great victory | Tennis | Sport

Roger Federer cries as he looks at the trophy he just lost. It seems he even sniffs snot. This is an image that runs out of adjectives. This is a huge lesson, perhaps the greatest ever taught by a champion. This was in Australia in 2009. Roger wears a sponsor’s watch on his wrist, which he wore at the end of the game. He fulfilled the contract and believes that he fulfilled the era, but no, it just so happened that the era is no longer his alone. He fought back all those tears a year ago in London. There Federer defended the surface crown that had brought him glory and honor, while Nadal attacked it with the ferocity with which young armies build an empire. It wasn’t a coincidence, it was War and Peace. The champion defended his legendary blade with blows in the pasture, where he lifted it and shaped it, and the candidate demonstrated the mental strength of a roller that moves forward with safety tank. It rained, night fell, and from the moment these two stepped onto the court, seven hours, five sets and two tiebreakers.

It was the best match in tennis history. You should see this from time to time. You feel the electricity, the rain, the smell of grass, the night and two legends at their best: two styles, two cultures, two tennis civilizations built in parallel and destined to populate the same courts on the same dates. Nadal’s first match point was decided by Federer in the dark by subtracting the ball from the line; This is how fame develops. In the fifth set, when Federer takes the field but Nadal is tied at seven games, they play a ridiculous, crazy moment in which Nadal hits the net with everything he has, and Federer puts his racket down to score something, and it turns out that his answer goes almost to the line (the London crowd is screaming, they no longer know where to go), and Rafa, instead of moving a tenth away from the match, resumes the hand as if nothing had happened and ends it with a right to that the stunned Federer didn’t even run.

In Australia they met again in the fifth set and Nadal walked away without much thought; The worst thing about hunger is that you lose your composure at the table. This was when Federer started crying at the end of the match. At that point in his life, Federer would have traded the riches of the world for a set that would take him back to the top, where he no longer exists. Borges wrote: “Only what we have lost is ours (…) Every poem eventually becomes an elegy. Our women are the women who have left us, no longer subject to the threshold that is anxiety, anxiety and the horrors of hope. There is no other paradise than the lost paradise.”

Federer cried as he would have cried 20 years ago at one of the youth tournaments in Basel. There is probably a photograph of him with his hands on his hips, his face streaked with tears, and his gaze lost in the glass being raised by his rival. In his transition to legend, no one knows how, Federer kept intact the boy who picked up the first racket. And Nadal? Nadal had only been in the elite for five years and was already dominating the world. He did it unusually and passionately, the only way he could break Roger Federer’s armored concentration, which was pure dancing, the last major one-handed failure in the history of tennis (let’s hope there’s another failure on the same level). : what a bewitching beauty in this frame).

“No matter how hard the ball is hit, the best players always control the ball. You don’t see high-quality players who don’t feel the ball very well. Because at the end of the day, the game is decided by a few balls and the players with the most feel in their hands are the ones who have the most consistency, the ones who are at the top, the ones who come up in the later rounds,” he said. said earnings per share almost a year ago.

“With all due respect to Rafa, I think it would have been better if I had won,” Federer said of Wimbledon 2008 in his famous Dartmouth graduation speech. “In 2008, I was aiming to win my sixth Wimbledon title in a row, a record I played to make history. But if I look back, I feel like I lost from the first point of the match. I looked behind the net and saw the guy who crushed me in three sets at Roland Garros a few weeks ago, and I thought, “This guy is hungrier than me.” And finally he managed to win and take number one from me. He was on top of me until the third set before I remembered, “Hey buddy, you’re the five-time defending champion!” And you play on the grass. You know what you need to do. But I reacted late and Rafa won, and it was well deserved.”

There is nothing left of them on the asphalt in London. Not from those of us who followed this game. Farewell to Rafa Nadal, the best Spanish athlete in history, 20 years in the elite, only the last two outside the finals, a man exhausted by his own body, leaves a trace of that fantastic sadness of Bradomin in Autumn Sonata from Valle Inclan: we weep like the ancient gods when their cult fades away.