14-time champion Rafael Nadal announced on Thursday that he will miss the French Open 2023 and will need at least 2-3 months to recover from injury. No other player has won a single Grand Slam title as many time as Nadal has at Roland Garros.
Nadal also hinted in a press conference that 2024 could he his final year in professional tennis.
“I’m not going to be able to play Roland Garros. We were not able to find the solution to the problem I had in Australia,” Nadal revealed in a press conference.
"Today I'm still in a position that I am not able to feel myself ready to compete at the standards that I need to be [at] to play a Roland Garros. I am not the guy that is going to be at Roland Garros and just try to be there and put myself in a position that I don't like to be [in]," he added.
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Roland Garros will be without Rafael Nadal for the first time since 2004.
The 36-year-old has not competed since January at the Australian Open, where he suffered an injury to the iliopsoas muscle in his left leg. Nadal and his team were expecting a recovery period of six to eight weeks, but the lefty has not returned to action.
The Spaniard was happy with his on-court results, like when last year he won the Australian Open and Roland Garros. But he "was not able to enjoy [his] daily work" because of his physical problems.
“Since after the pandemic, my body was not able to hold the practices and to hold the daily work in a good way. So I was not able to enjoy the practices and the competition because [there were] too many problems, too many times having to stop for physical issues and too many days of going here practising but with with too much pain,” Nadal said.
“So after I said that I need to stop. I need to stop for a while. So my decision is to stop. I don't know when I'm going to be able to come back to the practice court, but I'm going to stop for a while. Maybe two months, maybe one month and a half, maybe three months, maybe four months.
“I don't know, I am not the guy who likes to predict a lot the future, so I'm just following my my personal feelings and just following what I really believe is the right thing to do for for my body and for my personal happiness now.”
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