It is not easy to understand sport.

And certainly not top sport.

Top-class sport has to do with talent, but even more with inner drive.

Even with inconsiderateness towards oneself. If you want to understand the soul of sport, you should look all the way up.

To where the best are on the move, the masters of their trade.

Rafael Nadal may be the best example.

The Mallorcan tennis god, a man formed of muscle and sweat, has won the French Open, the world's most important clay court tournament, for the 14th time.

Nadal is 36 years old and when the cameras are aimed at him from above you can see that his hair is thinning.

In the era of top tennis he is an old man.

Ambition taken to the extreme

He still won the final for the 14th title.

He won it with a broken foot, like six games in Paris before.

At first he played with pain, and when that was no longer possible, even for him, he had his nerves injected, the alarm indicators that radio the pain up into the brain.

Many did not understand that.

How can he risk his health for another title?

That may be a fair question, but isn't it also true that these people are who they are, so extraordinary, because their stakes have always been far greater than that of others?

Because they deal with disappointment, doubts and pain differently than others.

Nadal did what he always does in Paris: he took his sport, his commitment, his ambition to the extreme.

Why is that surprising to anyone?

Does anyone think Nadal would have gotten to where he is without this limitless drive?

If you want to know how deep the roots of the sport go into people's souls, look at Nadal's rituals, his compulsions before he's even able to hit a serve over the net.

His drinking bottles have to be positioned diagonally with millimeter precision.

That's the only way they'll keep his head in order.

The towel must hang bolt upright over the gang.

And then he has to touch his trousers with his free hand, then shirt, nose, ear, nose, ear, trousers, he has performed this bizarre spectacle thousands of times, the Danish writer Daniel Dencik probably meant something similar when he described how a person's demons surface to gasp for air.

None of this can be healthy.

Not for the body, not for the mind.

But why should it be healthy?

It's top sport.

We amateur athletes have no say in that.

It's a sport from another world.