![]() ![]() A master not only of the game, but the elements - becoming one with the surface in a way we just haven’t seen with any other player in the history of the sport.īeyond the championships is his insurmountable record. It’s this element, paired with his natural skill to handle the technical, slower paced surface that took a brilliant tennis player and turned him into something else. An estimated 84 percent of tennis courts in Spain are clay, and it’s a surface he grew up training and competing on. Nadal didn’t just master the clay, it was a part of him from the beginning. Even before Sunday Nadal had more than doubled it. ![]() Prior to his arrival in 2005 only seven players had ever won more than one French Open, the greatest clay player of all time prior to Nadal, Bjorn Borg, won six titles in the Open Era. Molding the French clay into an edifice of brilliance so imposing that it would take impossible bravery (or stupidity) to even attempt to scale it and conquer the record. Nadal has built a monolith out of his success. Nobody will ever, ever come close to Nadal’s Open Era titles at Roland Garros, and that was true before Sunday and even more after it. There’s functionally little difference between a 13th French Open win and a 14th, other than Nadal separating from history even more. There was nothing that needed to be cemented in Nadal’s legacy at this point. On Sunday, the 36-year-old Spaniard captured his record 14th French Open title by quickly dispatching Norway’s Casper Ruud in straight sets. ![]() ![]() Rafael Nadal’s accomplishments at Roland Garros defy belief. ![]()
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