On April 25, 18 years will have passed since Rafael Nadal entered among the ten best tennis players in the world, a space that he leaves this Monday, after inhabiting it uninterruptedly in all this time. The fall is the result of logic, of his absence from the circuit since he lost in the second round of the Australian Open to American Makenzie McDonald and suffered a psoas injury. The Spaniard will appear from Monday thirteenth in the ranking, with 2,715 points.

No one since the creation of the ranking has shown greater regularity than the winner of 22 Grand Slam titles, who, despite long periods off the courts due to physical problems, such as the one he now faces, always kept the type within the top 10. It has been 912 weeks, ahead of Jimmy Connors' 789, between 1973 and 1988, Roger Federer's 742, between 2002 and 2016, Ivan Lendl's 619, between 1981 and 1992, and Pete Sampras' 585, between 1990 and 2001.

Great start in 2022

Nadal has not been able to defend the excellent numbers credited in an exceptional start to 2022, when he won consecutively the ATP 250 in Melbourne, the Australian Open and the ATP 500 in Acapulco, before losing the Indian Wells final conditioned by a rib fissure suffered against Carlos Alcaraz in the semifinals. As he fine-tunes his set-up, expected for the Monte Carlo Masters 1000, which begins on April 10, the man who has worn the world No. 209 for 1 weeks assumes that in the coming weeks he will run into dangerous opponents much sooner than he is used to.

Taylor Fritz's triumph against Frances Tiafoe in the quarterfinals of the last edition of the Acapulco tournament assured him of being at least the tenth player to be ahead of Nadal when the ATP ranking is made public on Monday. On the way to 37 years, which will turn on June 3, Nadal faces the final stretch of his career with the absolutely priority objective of maintaining the struggle with Novak Djokovic to close his sporting career with more Grand Slam titles. The company becomes more difficult after losing status.

On his side, in the immediate, he has the scarce harvest to defend in the next tournaments. He does not exhibit anything in Monte Carlo or Barcelona, since he was absent in both tournaments due to injury. Only 180 points from the quarterfinals of the Mutua Madrid Open and 90 from the Masters 1000 in Rome.

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  • Rafa Nadal
  • Novak Djokovic
  • Carlos Alcaraz