The Spanish Meteor
I realize the question must seem silly and/or rhetorical, but bear with me. As I was reading through some conversations about Rafael Nadal on the Tennis Frontier discussion forums and looking at his career statistics page on Wikipedia, as I often do when discussion of a specific player comes up, I noticed something about Rafa. It is well-known that he had a meteoric rise to the top at a very young age, without the usual long developmental phase that most players go through. He went from around No. 50 in the rankings for a couple years to No. 2 the year he turned 19 years old. Think about that for a moment – that would be like 19-year-old Nick Kyrgios being the No. 2 player in the world right now, or Borna Coric next year — or Grigor Dimitrov four years ago!
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But that wasn’t anything new. The thought, or question, that came to me is whether or not, or to what degree, Rafa has improved since that amazing 2005 season? I had noticed his pattern before, but I hadn’t given much thought to it, so I decided to investigate a bit and see what the data tells us.
Developmental Patterns
To start, let’s compare his developmental pattern to those of the other three of the four very greatest players of the last 25 years (I’m deliberately ignoring Andre Agassi because his developmental rise–while early–was extremely unusual and fraught with “off court” issues, and I’m not looking before this era because the further back you go, the less similar the game is).
Player: Year-end Rank From Age 18-22
Nadal: 51, 2, 2, 2, 1
Federer: 64, 29, 13, 6, 2
Djokovic: 78, 16, 3, 3, 3
Sampras: 81, 5, 6, 3, 1
Notice how all four were ranked roughly similarly at age 18, all between No. 51 and No. 81. But starting with age 19 we can pair Rafa and Pete on one hand, and Roger and Novak on the other. The former pair went straight from the latter half of the Top 100 to the Top 5. To put that in a current context, that would be as if Borna Coric–who will finish this year ranked No. 91–rises into the Top 5, or at least Top 10 next year. We can only hope, but it seems extremely unlikely.
Roger and Novak, on the other hand, had a kind of “beachhead” year – Roger rising to No. 29 at age 19, Novak to No. 16. Actually, Roger had a second beachhead year, finishing his age 20 season at No. 13, and a “semi-beachhead” year at age 21, finishing No. 6. Roger’s rise to greatness was notoriously gradual, at least compared to other all-time greats. He didn’t win a Slam until just before his 22nd birthday; consider that Rafa won his fourth Slam just after turning 22.
These rankings are, of course, merely a reflection of performance, so if we look at titles Rafa was extremely successful in 2005, winning 11 titles – the most of his career. And this wasn’t a lightweight title season: not only did he win his first of nine French Opens, but he also won four Masters tournaments.
But those were surely all clay court tournaments, right? Actually, no. Of the four Masters titles, two were on hard courts: the Rogers Cup, in which he beat a 35-year-old Andre Agassi, 16 years older than Nadal; and the Madrid Masters, the indoor hard-court version that was replaced by the Shanghai Masters in 2009. So even in 2005, Rafa was able to perform at an elite level outside of the clay courts. This was further solidified in 2006 at the Slams. After he won his second French Open that year, he was going into Wimbledon with only two second-week Slam appearances, his two Roland Garros titles. But then he made it to the Wimbledon final and the US Open quarterfinal, cementing his all-surface elite status.
Let us turn our gaze to winning percentage. Take a look at the four players, from age 18 to 27 (I stop at 27 because all four have played through that age, and beyond isn’t really relevant):
Here we see four subtly, but still distinctly different developmental patterns. All jumped in performance level from age 18-19. But as you can see, Rafa was pretty steady from that point onward (and off the chart is 2014, in which he had an 81% – his worst since 2004, but still roughly within range of the rest of this chart). He fluctuated, of course, but whereas the others all had some variation of rise, peak, and plateau, Rafa’s pattern has been more up and down within an early peak-plateau range. Also, notice how the 2005-14 range has no winning percentages in the 84-87 range; it is either a “down” year of 81-83 or an “up” year of 88-91.
Roger’s is a classic curve: a steady rise, high peak, and then descent to an up-and-down late-career plateau that continues to this day. Sampras was kind of a hybrid of Nadal and Federer: a quick rise, long peak-plateau, then decline. Novak has an interesting early plateau in his early 20s, and then a rise at age 24, his legendary 2011 season.
Putting It All Together
So what does this data tell us? First, what it can’t tell us are all the changes to Rafa’s game, whether we’re talking micro-adjustments or larger ones. We know, for instance, that his serve improved in 2010, probably his best overall year, but then has slipped again over the last few years. But the numbers don’t tell us about his real game, the sweat and focus and will that happens on court. But what it does tell us is that regardless of how his game has changed, his overall performance level has been very similar since breaking through as an elite player in 2005 at the tender age of 19.
That said, there is another–perhaps more nuanced–narrative that should be brought forth, which is that while he was great from 2005-07, he was still “unfinished” and, in particular, learning to establish himself off clay. His 2005 winning percentage is inflated by the fact that he played 52 matches on clay, or 58.4% of his total matches, compared to 26 in 2006 (36.6%) and 32 in 2007 (37.6%). So while his overall winning percentage dipped, a lot of that was because of fewer clay courts (although interestingly enough, his record on hards was actually better in 2005 than 2006-07).
To continue the narrative, Rafa was still developing in 2005-07 and then came more fully into his own in 2008 at the age of 21-22, when we saw a more “complete” Rafa. This was Rafa in his prime, finally and fully. 2009 saw two bumps in the road, one being injury and the other being Robin Soderling. Yet he regained his balance in 2010, having his best year of all. And then in 2011 Novak Djokovic had a season for the ages, and while Rafa was probably just as good as he had been the previous year, he couldn’t get around Novak. In 2010 Rafa was 2-0 against the Serb, but in 2011 he was 0-5. Now here’s where it gets very interesting: If we take those matches out of his record for both years, we get the exact same record. Take a look:
2010 – with Novak: 71-10 (88%), without Novak: 69-10 (87%)
2011 – with Novak: 69-15 (82%), without Novak: 69-10 (87%)
In other words, Rafa was virtually the same in 2011 as he had been in 2010; it is just that Novak had his number. Rafa turned the tables in 2012 and they’ve been relatively even since, with Rafa having a slight edge at 7-6 since 2012. Aside from his rivalry with Novak, after his injury in 2012 Rafa rose again in 2013 and then struggled in 2014.
In summarizing Rafa’s trajectory, we see a quick rise to elite status in 2005 and then a kind of plateau as he worked on aspects of his game, rising to the very top in 2008. From that point on, he was on a higher level of play, but suffered various setbacks that reduced his overall performance level and thus lend credence to the argument that he reached his peak level in 2005 and hasn’t improved since. But I think the answer to the original question is that yes, he has improved since he was 19 in 2005, although perhaps not as much as players like Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, both of whom have followed more traditional “curved” career patterns.
In a way, Rafael Nadal was like some kind of Mediterranean demigod, born (nearly) fully formed, (nearly) perfect. Yet like the demigods of myth, he has suffered hardship and challenges, and the end results fluctuated with life’s trials and tribulations.
Addendum: Rafa’s Alleged “Decline”
Rafa’s demise has been long-prophesied but never fulfilled. He has always managed to comeback, to rise again as if from the ashes and reclaim his status as one of the very best in the game, certainly the best at times. Yet we cannot ignore the fact that time catches up to us all. Rafa turns 29 years old next year and at some point, the gentle fluctuation of his career pattern won’t rise back up from a fall in performance. I am not saying that this will happen in 2015 – in truth, I don’t think it will – but we should be prepared for it.
While we don’t know when it will happen, there might be signs beforehand. If you take one more look at the graph above you can notice that in Rafa’s career, there have been four dips, four “downward fluctuations” – in 2006-07, 2009, 2011, and one in 2014 off the chart. But as I pointed out above, the 2006-07 dip was mainly a matter of adjusting to a less clay-heavy schedule, so in truth the only downward turns were in 2009, 2011, and 2014 – his three injury-plagued years. And therein lies the key, and this is no surprise: Can Rafa remain healthy? If he can, I see no reason why he can’t remain on top for several more years. But if not, well, for those of us over three decades of age, we all know how it gets harder and harder to recover. We can hope, though, as fans of Rafa, fans of tennis (if not fans of Roger!) that we’ll see at least one more rise to the top from the great Spanish Meteor.
Cover Photo (Creative Commons License): James Marvin Phelps / Marianne Bevis
