The 'King of Clay' will miss Roland Garros. Fourteen-time champion Rafael Nadal announced his withdrawal from the clay-court major in a press conference in Mallorca on Thursday, marking the first time he'll miss his favorite Grand Slam in 19 years.
Nadal also added that his goal is to return to the ATP Tour for a farewell season in 2024, which he said will likely be his last.
Though he's missed the Australian Open, Wimbledon and the US Open due to injury at least twice each in his career, the news marks the first time that Nadal has withdrawn from Paris before the tournament since he won his first title there in 2005. (In 2016, he gave a walkover ahead of the third round.)
In 2004, a then-17-year-old Nadal was forced out of the tournament as a consequence of an ankle injury he suffered that spring at a tournament in Portugal.
"I was working as much as possible every single day for the last four months. It has been very difficult months because we were not able to find the solution to the problem that I had in Australia," Nadal said Thursday from his namesake tennis academy. "Today I'm still in a position that I am not able to feel myself ready to compete at the standards that I need to be [at] to play a Roland Garros. I am not the guy that is going to be at Roland Garros and just try to be there and put myself in a position that I don't like to be [in]."
The Spaniard, now 36, has been sidelined since a second-round loss to American Mackenzie McDonald at January's Australian Open due to a hip injury he picked up in the match. A day later, he revealed he suffered a grade 2 injury to his iliopsoas muscle, a large inner muscle of the hip. At the time, Nadal tweeted a statement that noted the normal recovery time from such an injury is six to eight weeks.
Tournaments he's missed this year as a result of the injury have included the ATP Masters 1000 events at Indian Wells, Miami, Monte Carlo, Madrid and Rome, as well as the ATP 500 event in Barcelona, which he's won a record 12 times and where the center court is named in his honor.
Due to his inactivity, Nadal fell out of the Top 10 on March 20 for the first time since 2005—the end of a 912-week streak. It was the longest such streak in the history of the ATP rankings. (Jimmy Connors ranks second at 789 weeks.) The defending champion in Paris, Nadal will lose 2,000 ranking points by not competing this year, and is projected to fall outside the world's Top 100 for the first time since May 2003 after the tournament ends.
“Since after the pandemic, my body was not able to hold the practices and to hold the daily work in a good way. So I was not able to enjoy the practices and the competition because [there were] too many problems, too many times having to stop for physical issues and too many days of going here practicing but with too much pain,” Nadal explained. “So after I said that I need to stop. I need to stop for a while. So my decision is to stop. I don't know when I'm going to be able to come back to the practice court, but I'm going to stop for a while. Maybe two months, maybe one month and a half, maybe three months, maybe four months.
“I don't know, I am not the guy who likes to predict a lot the future, so I'm just following my my personal feelings and just following what I really believe is the right thing to do for for my body and for my personal happiness now.”
Roland Garros begins on May 28.
