Rafael Nadal has revealed he spent most of his career in pain as he willed himself to play through a chronic foot injury and went on to win 22 grand slam titles while spending two decades ruling men’s tennis alongside Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic.
The Spaniard, who retired in 2024, said he took immense risks with his health to keep his career going, after a Netflix series called Rafa provided an in-depth look into his physical and mental struggles to pursue greatness.
“I’ve had to make decisions about my health, where you are on the borderline between right or wrong. But if I hadn’t explored all that, I probably would have had 10 fewer grand slams … this is the reality,” Nadal told the BBC on Friday.
Nadal was diagnosed with a rare condition called Mueller-Weiss syndrome after he broke a foot during the Madrid Open final of 2005, months after he won the French Open on his first attempt aged 19.
Although the condition, which may have been caused by his extensive training as a child, put his career at risk, Nadal refused to give up.
The injury haunted him even as he won 13 more grand slams in the next nine years, clinching at least one major every year. “Tennis became a race against time. Always having the doubt in my head of: ‘How long can I last with this foot?’ I never knew how long my career would last,” Nadal said. “I always thought: ‘Maybe it’s the last year, so there’s no time to stop.’”
The injury also led to other health complications, including tendinitis in his left knee and perforations in his intestines, the latter caused by the use of painkillers.
Sometimes he had to manage the pain with targeted anaesthetic injections, and he had no feeling in one leg during the final of the 2022 French Open, his last grand slam win. “The key was the suffering was less than my passion and my happiness for what I was doing,” the 39-year-old said.