Though it seems the right thing to do at this stage, there is no plan to retire the Coupe des Mousquetaires, the trophy that goes to the winner of the men’s singles title at the French Open.
Rafael Nadal has all but taken permanent possession of it, hoisting it high and biting down on its handle for the 11th time after defeating Dominic Thiem, 6-4, 6-3, 6-2, in the final on Sunday.
But the French are, in a sense, retiring the historic stadium in which Nadal has established his historic dominance.
Almost immediately after Thiem’s last return had flown long, the attendants in the tournament’s longstanding press room inside the Philippe Chatrier Court were distributing hard hats and colored markers to reporters and others for their demolition party. Much of the Chatrier Court, the main showplace at Roland Garros, will be demolished and rebuilt in the next 10 months to prepare for the installation of a retractable roof by 2020.
It will be a new era at the world’s greatest clay-court tournament, but given how Nadal demolished a worthy opponent from the next generation on Sunday, it would be no surprise if he managed to bridge the eras.
At age 32, he was in vintage form against Thiem, a 24-year-old Austrian who had beaten Nadal three times on clay — but never in a best-of-five-set match. Nadal, who had some shaky opening starts this year at Roland Garros, was well aware of the threat, and he was focused and ferocious from the first point.
“If you tell me, seven, eight years ago, that I will be here with 32 years old having this trophy with me again, I will tell you that it is something almost impossible,” Nadal said afterward. “But here we are.”
Players have approached his level of achievement on other surfaces: Pete Sampras, Roger Federer and Martina Navratilova on grass. But there has been no one like him on clay in any era.
Bjorn Borg was just as overwhelming at his peak but did not have Nadal’s staying power, burning out in his mid-20s. Chris Evert won seven women’s singles titles here over a 12-year period, but never won more than two in a row.
Nadal was a prodigy who has remained prodigious. While he has won six of his 17 Grand Slam singles titles on other surfaces, he is to clay what Michael Phelps is to water.
Like Phelps, his physique and technique are perfectly adapted to this environment: No one moves on terre battue like Nadal, and no one’s topspin forehand kicks like Nadal’s, not even Thiem’s, which is quite a versatile weapon on its own.
Like Phelps, Nadal has an enduring drive to excel even after having won all there is to win, many times over. Eleven was the number this year as he won his 11th career title in Monte Carlo, in Barcelona and in Paris.
Most would be jaded by now. But Nadal still plays tennis on clay with the match-by-match hunger of someone who has not won so much as a Challenger event, and though he is rightly famous for relishing the struggle as much as the victory, there is also an element of protecting his turf at this stage.
The rallies on Sunday were routinely physical and often extended, full of topspin and corner-to-corner action and punctuated by loud grunts that were every bit as clamorous as any in the women’s game (even if the grunting issue only seems to be a talking point in the women’s side).
But though Thiem regularly took huge risks to try to push Nadal outside of his comfort zone, he was also pushing beyond his own: He finished with 42 unforced errors to go with his 34 winners. Before the final, Thiem said he had a plan, and he stayed closer to the baseline than usual to return and to rally, trying to deprive Nadal of time.
He hit some spectacular shots, but he could not hit enough of them. He struggled repeatedly with the timing on his one-handed backhand as he tried to counter Nadal’s whipping topspin by hitting the ball right after the bounce.
He also picked the wrong time to play his worst game — serving into the wind at 4-5 in the first set — losing his serve at love to give Nadal the lead for good.
The Spaniard, who had plenty of plans of his own on Sunday and used the body serve very effectively, did have one edgy moment left.
Serving with a 2-1 lead in the third set, he stopped play while leading, 30-0, after missing a first serve, and jogged to his chair to address a cramp in his left hand that had left him unable to move his middle finger.
After treatment, he returned to the court and immediately double faulted, but still managed to hold. After more treatment on the next changeover, he won a 19-shot rally and held serve at love for a 4-2 lead.
He did not lose another game, and his record at Roland Garros is now 86-2: a far-fetched figure that is worth copying down in our notebooks 11 times.
He was asked what he thought, really thought, in the locker room after the victory, and he explained that there were so many obligations — hands to shake, questions to answer — that it was hard to have much time to think. But he gave it a shot.
“Well, the answer is quite simple,” he said. “I think probably the same as you. That in the end — and I don’t like to say it myself — but it’s something that is really unique, something that you can’t dream of, winning 11 times the same tournament. But it happened, and as always I would like to thank life for giving me this opportunity. Many people work as much as I do or even more and haven’t had my luck. That being said, yes, winning 11 times here is a lot.
“I can’t tell you any more than that.”
It is all in that answer, really: the humility, the reluctant realism. There has been some luck: Who could have imagined that Novak Djokovic, who seemed to have Nadal’s number on clay for good in 2015 and 2016, would fade from prominence so quickly? But without Nadal’s humility and internal drive, he would never have been able to keep pushing himself; to keep doing the unglamorous work to recover from physical setbacks, most recently the psoas muscle problem that forced him to retire in the middle of the Australian Open in January and then kept him from playing another tournament until early April.
“A lot of months with problems,” Nadal said. “So coming back and having the chance to win in Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Rome, and now especially here, it’s very emotional for me.”
He cried during the awards ceremony, which he has done before here. But these tears came as he held the trophy and received an extended ovation from the crowd that felt more like an extended recognition of his staying power.
It has rarely been a love affair. The French like their underdogs, and Nadal has too often drained the suspense out of their tournament. Both he and his uncle Toni Nadal resented the way the crowd cheered against him in the fourth round in 2009 as he lost to Robin Soderling, the Swedish outsider who is one of only two men to have beaten Nadal at Roland Garros.
There also have been insinuations and suspicions, reflected in the comment in 2016 by Roselyne Bachelot, a former French minister for health and sport, on French television that Nadal’s seven-month injury layoff in 2012 was “probably due to a positive doping test.”
Nadal was outraged and filed — and won — a defamation suit against Bachelot last year.
But the Franco-Nadal relationship seems to have arrived at a new and more convivial place. If he seemed the slightest bit blasé, it might be a different matter. Yet there he still was on a Sunday in the Paris spring, chasing every ball, groaning with nearly every stroke and whipping winners when he needed them most against a rival eight years his junior.
They can demolish the stadium, but his records here will likely stand until they demolish the next one.
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