With Rafael Nadal retiring in 2024, plenty has been made of his excellence over the past two decades. None more so than his incredible record at the French Open, where the Spaniard won the title 14 times over his career. As new stars emerge on the ATP Tour, we look at why this is one record that is in no danger of being broken.
The nature of clay court tennis
Andrey Rublev once described clay as “the proper tennis surface”, because tennis on clay is pure tennis. The assertion simply comes from the difficulty of playing tennis on a clay court and everything that goes into it.
It’s by far the slowest surface of all the tennis surfaces, and the ball bounces really high, which alters the style of play quite a bit. To put it simply, there are very few free points. When you’re on grass, you can hit plenty of aces, points are short, you can go to the net, and do lots of things to shorten the rallies.
The same thing applies to hard courts, though it depends on what type. Some are quicker and some are slower. On clay, you can’t win points with ease. Sure, there are some points that are shorter than others, but for the most part, you really have to work for it.
To win a match on clay, you have to outlast your opponent physically and you need to outsmart him in play. That’s why it’s sometimes called pure tennis because there are no shortcuts.
Rafael Nadal’s dominance on clay
The best to ever do it on this surface is Rafael Nadal. He proved himself on it by consistently winning in the biggest arena of clay tennis, which is Roland-Garros: the only Grand Slam played on clay.
Nadal has been by far the best player at the event, winning the event a whopping 14 times. Many have singled out this achievement as the greatest thing ever done in tennis – and perhaps all of sport – and there is a very good reason for that. It’s almost impossible to do because playing on clay is such a challenge.
The Spaniard’s game is tailor-made for it though. His lefty forehand might be the most devastating single shot to ever grace the clay courts, and it was at the center of what made him so tough. His backhand was also superbly useful for clay tennis, while his speed and movement was on another level too.
He grew up on the surface, so it’s normal that he’s has a tendency towards clay, but he was more than good; he was historically, impossibly good. Nadal’s career record on clay is 484-51, and while that is a crazy stat, seeing that he lost 50 times on the surface is crazy in itself.
The unparalleled achievement of Nadal at Roland-Garros
So does this mean Nadal’s 14 titles at Roland-Garros are unbeatable? In a nutshell: yes.
Winning it once is a tremendous achievement, simply because winning a Grand Slam on clay is that much harder than on any other surface. You need to be sensationally good for seven matches, outplaying your opponent in every facet of the game to win the matches.
Winning it twice is amazing, but winning it five times is just outrageous. Only two players in recent history have been able to do that, and they are Rafael Nadal and Bjorn Borg. Now, Borg was in his own right considered a historic tennis player who had a level impossible to reach.
Imagine now Nadal who has twice as many French Opens as Borg has. It’s outrageous, and then consider that only one player outside of Nadal has been able to win any of the other three Grand Slams 10 times. That’s Novak Djokovic with the Australian Open, so that paints a pretty clear picture of how hard it is in general to do something like that.
Now imagine having to do this on clay, where matches are sometimes twice as long as on other surfaces and where you have to work hard for every single point. It’s a crazy achievement, let alone doing it the way Nadal did: winning it 14 times and posting an all-time record at the event of 112-4.
That score basically tells you all you need to know when it comes to why this won’t ever happen again. The surface itself makes it impossibly hard, since it’s so difficult to dominate on it.
As optimistic as tennis fans may be about the rise of Jannik sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, there simply won’t ever be a player as dominant on clay as Nadal. It’s statistically improbable, and even if somebody similar to him has appeared, Nadal set the bar so high that it’s just impossible to imagine anybody doing it again.
I completely agree. I loved Rafa since the very first match I ever saw him play almost two decades ago. He is a physical beast and he is relentless, He consistently worked harder than any other player on tour. I certainly admire Federer’s grace and pure tennis skills. I appreciate Djokovic’s athleticism. But for sheer strength, power, and unbending will, Rafa is an absolute force of nature. He was always willing to give every last ounce he had for as long as he had to. Beyond that, he gave more to the sport than any of his contemporaries. Frankly, I have always been far more impressed by Roger’s eight Wimbledon titles than I ever was by Djokovic’s Australians. But for overall dominance of the sport, nothing and no one can begin to approach Rafa on clay. Regardless of where the sport goes, I don’t believe anyone ever will. Rafa is the king.