The Rafael Nadal party has resumed at Roland Garros, and Iga Swiatek is its newest promoter
Is it even Roland Garros without a Rafael Nadal party at the end?
For the last 17 years, the answer to that has been a resounding 'no'. Yes there have been a few occasions (four, to be precise) when Nadal wasn't holding up the trophy on the final Sunday, but those editions felt fleeting and unnatural. It was almost as though the universe was tilted sideways; we knew the winners deserved the spoils, but we couldn't shake off the feeling that the resumption of normal service was inevitable.
Normal service well and truly resumed on Sunday as Nadal trounced Casper Ruud 6-3, 6-3, 6-0 to seal his utterly ridiculous 14th Roland Garros title. But there was something a little different in the 2022 edition of the tournament. This year, the Rafa Nadal party didn't start only after the Spaniard bludgeoned one final forehand to clinch match point; instead, the entire second week felt like a celebration of all things Nadal.
For one thing, the 36-year-old's final opponent famously attended the Rafa Nadal academy in Mallorca as a youngster. Ruud idolizes Nadal in a way that few other players do, and there's no better evidence of that in his playing style. The Norwegian has a whippy, bolo-like topspin forehand that looks straight out of the Nadal playbook, and his consistency-first approach seems destined to reap rich rewards on clay.
Then there's the women's champion Iga Swiatek, who has made no secret of her admiration of Nadal. Swiatek has a whippy forehand too, and the way she thrashed her last three opponents (to go with her first dominant run back in 2020) has convinced most that she will create her own Nadal-like legacy at Roland Garros.
Okay maybe not 'Nadal-like', because how can anyone possibly come anywhere close to what the man has achieved in Paris? You get my point though; Swiatek seems likely to boss the tournament in the years to come.
There's more; the player Swiatek beat in the semis, Daria Kasatkina, could justifiably be called an honorary Nadal family member. Kasatkina is the kind of Nadal fangirl you hear about but are afraid to talk to, lest you are pulled into a world of complicated excel sheets and angry Twitter rants that make you question your very existence.
Naturally, all these fanboys and fangirls were repeatedly posed questions about Nadal during their press conferences over the fortnight. And to be perfectly honest, it seems like at least one player - Swiatek - has gotten a little tired of being asked the same thing over and over again.
But full credit to the Pole for trying to come up with different takes on what Nadal means to her. And it was one particular answer from Swiatek that stayed with me.
"I feel like all these great champions, they kind of accept that they may lose," Swiatek said after her win over Coco Gauff on Saturday. "I remember even last year when Rafa lost in semifinals, I met him next day, coincidence, on the breakfast in the hotel, and I said to him that I was crying basically the whole evening because he lost. He was sitting, and he was, like, Oh, it's just a tennis match, you know. You win; you lose. It's normal."
There's nothing 'normal' about what Rafael Nadal does on a tennis court, and at Roland Garros in particular. But when you hear the man call his barn-burning loss to Novak Djokovic in the 2021 semifinals as 'just a tennis match', you start to get a faint idea of how he's been able to create this gargantuan edifice in Paris.
It has often been said that Nadal plays every point like it is his last, which is as good an explanation as any for his unwaveringly frenetic intensity on the court. What's talked about a lot less frequently is that the Spaniard's willingness to put everything on the line every single time doesn't come out of thin air. It is, instead, born out of an understanding that matches and wins and losses are but temporary elements on the large canvas we call life.
The only constant in life is change, and Nadal knows that. You don't keep winning forever; heck, you don't even keep playing forever. So why not give everything you've got in the present moment, and accept whatever outcome that comes your way?
It sounds like a simple enough formula, but it is far from easy to implement.
"That's something, it's pretty easy, but not everybody can do that and just treat those big moments as another match, you know," Swiatek went on to say. "That's something special."
Funnily enough, Swiatek seems to be on course to master this art herself. The Pole, as you've probably heard, has won 35 matches and six titles on the trot, and is looking increasingly likely to re-establish the kind of dominant reigns that were once the preserve of players like Margaret Court and Steffi Graf. But the thing that stands out the most in this run is Swiatek's utter disregard for the pressure of the big occasion.
The 21-year-old wins most of her matches easily, but nowhere is she more ruthless than in finals. Swiatek hasn't dropped more than four games in a set in any final she's played the last two years, and when Gauff won her first game on Saturday many were relieved to know it wasn't going to be a bagel.
Swiatek has learned to treat a final like any other match, and a match like any other chore of her day-to-day life. She has seemingly freed her mind from the expectations that come with being good at what you do, and from the pressure that comes with obsessing over the big picture.
The woman herself sounded a lot less confident about why playing finals comes so easily to her, but you could probably chalk that down to her tendency to downplay everything that she achieves. It's just Swiatek things.
"Honestly, I try to treat it as any other match, which is pretty hard and kind of not possible," Swiatek said on Saturday. "But I guess I'm kind of accepting that a little bit more and just, I try to lean on the strengths and the things that I have, you know, better maybe. I'm also aware that my opponents are also going to be stressed. So I try to not panic and just be less stressed than they are."
The relative lack of "stress" has never been more evident in Swiatek's game than it has over the last two months. In the past she had a tendency to start rushing her shots in the face of hard hitters or sticky situations, but now she looks relaxed all the time.
The Pole's backhand in particular has become a shot that can seemingly do anything on command. Whether she needs it for a desperate retrieval or to end a point with a clean winner, the backhand always shows up like a cool cucumber.
There was, however, one instance this fortnight where Swiatek did seem to get ahead of herself - the first set against Zheng Qinwen in the fourth round. But that was an exception that proved the rule; Swiatek calmly hit the reset button in the second set and further refined her unique mix of offense and defense.
She lost only two more games in that match, and never looked in danger for the rest of the tournament.
It's a mark of just how quickly Swiatek has grown that her win seemed even more inevitable than even Nadal's. Despite the Spaniard's mountain of achievements at Roland Garros he wasn't tipped by many to beat Djokovic, Alcaraz and (possibly) Tsitsipas in succession, as his draw seemed to dictate.
After all, Nadal had come into Paris without a claycourt title in the season for the first time ever (discounting the truncated 2020 season). He was also struggling with a chronic foot condition, and by the second round everyone knew he was playing on anesthetic painkillers.
Felix Auger-Aliassime took him to five sets right before the big test against Novak Djokovic, and at that point it looked like a repeat of the 2021 semifinals was on the cards. But Nadal, having already had his foot numbed, proceeded to get his mind numbed too.
Playing as though in a trance, the Spaniard produced some of his best tennis in recent times to snatch the decisive fourth set right out of Djokovic's nose. The tournament's outcome wasn't in doubt after that - anaesthesia or not, Nadal wasn't going to lose to Zverev or Ruud on his favorite turf.
Sure he got a little lucky with Zverev's injury, which came just when it was starting to feel like the semifinal match would end up being a five-hour marathon (the first two sets alone took up three hours). But Nadal deserves credit for putting himself in position to get lucky.
If he hadn't conjured that forehand pass at 4-6 in the first set tiebreak, he may well have given Zverev the belief that he could actually win.
MINDBLOWING 🤯
and trailing set point!
#RolandGarros | @RafaelNadal https://t.co/rSFQ97j0As
Sunday's final against Ruud was a mere formality given the Norwegian's infamously weak backhand. You don't beat Nadal at Roland Garros without a flat, powerful and consistently deep backhand, and Ruud's backhand is none of those things.
It was arguably the most predictable big-tournament final in recent memory, and nobody was surprised when Nadal inflicted a bagel on his hapless opponent in the third set.
So why did the man himself claim that he was, in fact, surprised at making it 14 Roland Garros trophies?
"If don't surprise you win 14 Roland Garros or 22 Grand Slam, is because you are super arrogant," Nadal said in his post-match presser. "Honestly, no, I am not this kind of guy. I never even dream about achieve the things that I achieved. Honestly, no, I never considered myself that good."
"So I am just honestly keep going step by step, practice by practice, and always with a clear goal to improve something," he added. "That's my mindset all during all my tennis career, no? Go on court and every practice with the goal to improve something in my game. I don't understand the sport another way."
There you have it again; that refusal to think beyond what you have already achieved, that obliviousness to the big picture that everyone is exhorting you to aim for. Nadal simply doesn't "understand" the sport any other way.
It wouldn't surprise me if Nadal didn't aspire to win more than one Roland Garros title before he won his first. It would also not surprise me if Nadal never looked at his quarterfinal match against Djokovic this year as a chance for revenge.
That approach is in sharp contrast to his rival himself; Djokovic has never shied away from declaring that he wants to break the biggest records in tennis. There are other contrasting examples too; in the women's game we have Serena Williams, who has always been determined to become the greatest ever (and who has treated every encounter against a certain Maria Sharapova as an excuse to inflict punishment for that one Wimbledon loss).
Djokovic's and Williams' methods have worked for them, as we can see in their Slam tallies and impossibly mammoth accomplishments. Nadal's approach has worked too, of course, but is there a reason it works particularly well at Roland Garros, a place where he far outstrips the achievements of any other player in history?
Clay requires patience. It demands that you stay in the moment, focus on using your strengths to the fullest, and don't take any point for granted until the last shot has gone in your favor. If you worry too much about the result, or indeed, think about anything other than the ball that is coming over the net, you are going to stumble.
In other words, you've got to be like a kid in a playground when you step on to a claycourt. And there's nobody better than Nadal at channeling the kid inside when faced with the task of breaking down the best players in the world.
"It's not about being the best of the history," Nadal said on Sunday when asked what drives him to keep going. "It's not about the records. It's about I like what I do, you know. I like to play tennis. And I like the competition."
Look beneath the injuries and the accolades and the fame, and you're left with this: Rafael Nadal likes to play tennis. You can bet that he'll keep liking it forever too, even when he is no longer on the professional tour. And despite all the rumors and worries about his retirement - which may or may not happen in the coming few months - at this point it almost doesn't matter how long he keeps playing.
Nadal has already sealed his place in the pantheon of greats (I'll refrain from calling him the 'GOAT' just yet because I've learned my lesson about not rushing with this term), and he's already achieved more than he ever imagined. The sheer fact that he is still so unbothered about the pressures of the game - that he's still a kid in the playground - is enough to give us a legacy that will stand the test of time.
Incidentally, two years ago I had described Iga Swiatek as a kid in the playground too. That was when she was just starting out on the tour, and before her stress-filled 2021 season. But she's back to a similar state now, and the results are there for everyone to see.
Whether Nadal retires tomorrow or keeps playing another few years, his spirit will endure forever - in the form of Swiatek, in the form of Ruud, in the form of everyone who has ever played tennis for the fun of it. And that may well be an even more impressive achievement than his utterly ridiculous haul of 14 French Open titles.
In short, it will always be a Rafael Nadal Party at Roland Garros.