Rafa Nadal finally brought two decades at the summit of professional tennis to an end last week.
Amid the tears and the tributes it was easy to overlook the fact that the 14-time French Open champion spent much of his career in agony. He wrestled with a chronic foot condition call Mueller-Weiss syndrome for years and spent most of 2023 nursing a hip injury.
The pain and the torment were the price to be paid for winning 22 Grand Slam titles. A masochistic streak ran through everything when he admitted: ‘I learned during all my career to enjoy suffering.