Current world N.3 and 20-time Slam champion Rafa Nadal has decided not to play in the 2021 Championships nor in the re-scheduled 2020 Tokyo Olympics. In a series of Tweets, the Spaniard has made the news official while elaborating on the reasons behind this choice:
In a lengthy thread, he elaborated: “The goal is to prolong my career and continue to do what makes me happy, that is to compete at the highest level and keep fighting for those professional and personal goals at he maximum level of competition. The fact that there has only been 2 weeks between RG and Wimbledon, didn’t make it easier on my body to recuperate after the always demanding clay court season.
“They have been two months of great effort and the decision I take is focused looking at the mid and long term. Sport prevention of any kind of excess in my body is a very important factor at this stage of my career in order to try to keep fighting for the highest level of competition and titles”.
Nadal won in Barcelona and Rome, before bowing out against Novak Djokovic in a four-hours-and-eleven-minutes semifinal, ending an unbeaten run of 33 matches in Paris.
On the Tokyo event, he added: “The Olympic Games always meant a lot and they were always a priority as a Sports person, I found the spirit that every sports person in the world wants to live. I personally had the chance to live 3 of them and had the honor to be the flag bearer for my country.”
Nadal is a two-time Wimbledon champion (2008 and 2010) and has reached the semi-finals in the last two editions. This means that he will lose 360 points, since the Championships are among the tournaments that allow the players to keep 50 percent of their 2019 tallies under the revised ranking system.
He is also a two-time Olympic gold medalist: he won in the singles in Beijing in 2008 and in the doubles in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 partnering Marc Lopez – in Brazil, he also finished fourth in the singles event.
