"I'm not going to play Roland Garros." This was announced by Rafa Nadal during a press conference convened by the Spanish athlete himself at his "Academia".
The Mallorcan tennis player said he will not play "for a series of months" without specifying when he will return. Instead, he set the date of the retreat, explaining that what will come (2024) "will be my last year".
The announcement in a year, this of 2023, marked by a long absence of the champion who saw him leave the world top 10 for the first time in 18 years.
"I would like to fight for important goals, but the physicist does not agree. I have to look ahead, fortunately there are so many beautiful things in my daily life. You can't always ask too much of the body, it's he who at a certain moment told me stop. Now I stop and think about the future. What will happen I don't know. You can't control everything, it's hard to make predictions. I am a positive and I will try to get back to playing competitively. I wouldn't want a 2024 extra, I would like to go on the pitch and win." So Rafael Nadal announcing his forfeit at Roland Garros 2023 and his absence from the ATP circuit also in the coming months.
He was asked if he will retire after the Paris 2024 Games. "I can't say anything now, I can't make predictions. I don't know how my body will respond, if I'll be able to compete. I would like to play the important tournaments, including the Olympic Games. But I can't say if I'll close at the Paris Olympics," Nadal added.
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Rafael Nadal
"It's not a decision I'm making, but my body," said the Spanish champion, who will surely also miss Wimbledon and most likely the US Open, before starting to play again.
"It's probably going to be my last year on the professional circuit, but I can't say 100% because you never know what's going to happen."
After a career plagued by knee, wrist and foot injuries in particular, alarm bells have sounded louder and louder over the past year. In June 2022 he won his XIV French Open, but only after revealing that he needed daily pain-relieving injections into his foot, a consequence of Mueller-Weiss syndrome, a rare degenerative disease.
"I played without feeling in the foot, with a pain-relieving injection into the nerve. My foot fell asleep and that's why I was able to play," he said at the time in Paris. He added that he would undergo treatment that involved burning the nerves in his foot to permanently ease the pain. Weeks later, his dream of winning his third Wimbledon title ended with his retirement in the semifinals due to an abdominal strain.