What to tell at this point Rafael Nadal without falling into repetition, in redundancy, in the well-known loa, in the compliment a thousand times narrated? What to say at this point about Nadal if it is necessary that the speaker of the tournaments arrive a quarter of an hour earlier just to list his record, like verses from the Bible? So much has been written about him that the truly original thing is not to write anything.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand his endless deed is to tell what has happened to Spain since Nadal got his first Ronald Garros in 2005. For example, four presidents of the Government. We have witnessed the decline of bipartisanship, three motions of censure, the birth of several statewide parties, the fervor of the 15 Mto the abdication of a King, to a referendum in Catalonia. We celebrate the end of ETAa worlda European Championship, the great feminist wave. We were shaken by another jihadist attack, with an accident of the Alvia. we fight in Tuenti, we congratulate on Facebookwe laugh at Twitterwe gathered self-esteem in Instagramwe dance ridiculously in TikTok. We entered a crisis, I don’t know if we ever got out, we went back in. We are witnessing the arrival of Ebola, the terror of a global pandemic. We met Generation Z. We learned to put our masks on over our glasses.
It is also easy to tell your own life through the images of Nadal rubbing himself on the orange floor of the French track. For example, it has given me time to finish my journalism degree, find a job, publish three books, see the birth of a nephew, go to the funeral of three of my grandparents, read the speech at my best friend’s wedding, live in three countries. All lives can be counted through Nadal’s Roland Garros, always present, immutable. Probably in 2005 we thought that what could he achieve more if at 19 years old he had already achieved the most complicated. We did not know that what he was going to grant us, 17 years later, was the gift of time.