Rafael Nadal won 22 Grand Slam singles titles — the second-highest total in men's tennis history — while living in constant pain from a rare degenerative foot condition that nearly ended his career before it began. In a new Netflix series, the Spanish legend reveals how he navigated nearly two decades of chronic suffering to achieve one of sport's greatest careers, and the staggering toll it took on his body.
The injury began in 2005, the same year Nadal announced himself to the world by winning the French Open at age 19, defeating world number one Roger Federer in the semi-finals. After breaking his left foot during the Madrid Open final that year, doctors diagnosed him with Mueller-Weiss syndrome, a rare condition affecting immature bone. The diagnosis felt terminal — there were genuine fears he would never play tennis again. But with a specialist insole suggested by Dr. Ernesto Maceira, Nadal found a way to compete. The price of that choice, however, would haunt him for the rest of his playing days.
"Tennis became a race against time," Nadal said in the Netflix series. "Always having the doubt in my head of, 'how long can I last with this foot?' I never knew how long my career would last." The constant compensation required by the insole cascaded into other injuries. In 2012, tendinitis in his left knee forced him to withdraw from the London Olympics and the U.S. Open. "My knee was destroyed. The tendon basically had a hole in it," he revealed. The relentless use of anti-inflammatory medication to manage pain caused small perforations in his intestines — damage he still carries.
Yet Nadal kept pushing. In 2013, against medical advice, he competed at Indian Wells using anaesthetic injections to numb his knee pain, then won the tournament and nine others that year, reclaiming the world number one ranking. At the 2022 French Open, his 14th and final Roland Garros title, the pain in his foot was so severe that Dr. Angel Ruiz-Cotorro used targeted anaesthetic injections to make the sensory nerve go completely numb. Nadal had no feeling in his foot whatsoever — and he won anyway, prompting seven-time Grand Slam champion John McEnroe to marvel: "He doesn't feel his foot and he's winning this?"
Nadal credits much of this mentality to his uncle Toni, who coached him from age three with an uncompromising approach designed to build mental toughness. Toni denied young Rafael water for the first hour of training sessions and encouraged him to play through injury. The approach forged an extraordinary competitor, but it also cultivated a relationship with suffering that eventually required professional psychological intervention. At one point, anxiety manifested in such acute ways that Nadal couldn't swallow without holding a water bottle.
Asked in the BBC World Service's Sporting Witness programme how he continued at such a cost, Nadal reflected on the mathematics of sacrifice. "I've had to make decisions about my health, where you are on the borderline between right or wrong," he said. "But if I hadn't explored all that, I probably would have had 10 fewer Grand Slams. I'm not saying one or two, I'm saying 10 or 12. This is the reality." His retirement in 2024 marked the end of a career defined not by how many titles he won, but by the extraordinary price he paid to win them.