broke just about every single clay-court record<\/a> and will go down in history as one of the greatest ever tennis players.<\/p>\nRetirement after such a successful career was never going to be easy, but Nadal was always prepared.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went through the respect you must have for change,\u201d he explained. \u201cAll changes in life, at the very least, must generate some respect for how you will react to a new reality, a life that will be different from what you are used to, not only 20 years of a professional career, but since you were 10 years old.<\/p>\n
\u201cSports and tennis are what I devoted myself to completely.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was prepared because I exhausted my options to the end. The fact that I had exhausted all the real options I had to continue competing at the level I would have liked to continue at gave me the conviction and peace of mind to end in peace and be convinced that it was the decision I had to make because there was no more. The tank was already empty.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cThere are people who, logically, thought I should have stopped earlier, that the end didn\u2019t make sense. For me, it did make sense: you have to act according to who you are. I acted as such. I tried to exhaust my options until there really weren\u2019t any left. I liked what I was doing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t retire because I was tired of what I was doing or lacked the necessary motivation. I retired because my body couldn\u2019t take it anymore. I was still happy doing what I was doing. In the surgery, they told me I had options to fully recover from it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had to give myself a prudent time to find out. There came a point where I realised I could compete, but not at the level I needed to continue. I pushed my career to the limit, as far as I could take it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is a full year since the great Rafael Nadal retired from the sport he loves and he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":309437,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-309436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309436\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}