Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Nadal wins his 12th French Open title!

Rafael Nadal, the undisputed King of Clay, just won his 12th - yes, 12th! - trophy at Roland Garros. Wow, just wow!



Words cannot fully encapsulate how monumental this achievement is but here are some stats to try and frame the magnitude of Nadal's win:

  • Rafa alone holds the record - male or female - for the most titles at a single Grand Slam event at 12. He tied Margaret Court last year when he matched her 11 Australian Open titles with his 11th French Open title but he just moved past her record now.
  • He also matches Martina Navratilova for winning a single tournament the most times. Navratilova won the Virginia Slims of Chicago 12 times. No other player has won a single tournament more times.
  • His 12 French Open titles equal Roy Emerson's total Grand Slam singles title haul. Emerson previously held the men's record with 12 majors before Pete Sampras overtook him in the 1990s. Nadal's tally of 12 also exceeds Rod Laver's and Bjorn Borg's total slam count of 11. So all of Nadal's wins are matching and exceeding the total tallies of some of the greatest male players of all time.


  • Nadal now has 18 Grand Slam singles titles, equaling Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert. A couple of decades ago, it was unimaginable that the greatest male players would match the Grand Slam records of the best women players. (Sampras had the record at 14 while Court had 24, Steffi Graf had 22, Helen Wills Moody had 19, and Navratilova and Evert had 18). Now Federer has passed Navratilova and Evert and Nadal has matched them.
  • He now has a win-loss record of 93-2 in Roland Garros. That is just staggering.

Despite being a Rafa fan, I felt really bad for Dominic Thiem towards the end of the match and during the trophy ceremony. At some point in the 3rd set, he started looking dejected. While he continued to show flashes of brilliance, it looked like he ran out of gas. One has to think that Thiem's tough semifinal against Novak Djokovic that went to 7-5 in the fifth set and had to be played over two days - until the late afternoon of Saturday - had some effect. It must've taken a lot of will power and physical energy to edge Novak in a match that could so easily have gone either way, with all its twists and turns up until the very end. I do hope that Thiem wins this tournament in the near future. If there was any one player who I wouldn't mind as much to take the throne from Rafa, it is Thiem.



Rafa has already been one of the greatest players of all time for a while now so he didn't need this win to prove that. Nevertheless, his 12 French Open titles may very well be a record we never see getting broken in our lifetimes and I feel very privileged to witness history in the making.

Congratulations, Rafael Nadal!
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