All athletes fall but Rafael Nadal in Paris is sweaty and gracious to the end

The only and brilliant guarantee of sport is that everyone falls. All streaks end, all auras wilt, all heroes fade. And so it’s not that athletes’ fall which truly matters, but how they fall. How they write their final episodes, what they leave behind in the dust, how straight they stand as mortality beckons. What else is the drama of sport but this.

On May 27 in Paris, in a theatre of clay, an athlete was expected to fall, and he did, but how he fell was telling. Rafael Nadal, right to the end at Roland Garros – if indeed this was the end, for he cannot say – was exactly who he has always been. The striving, obstinate, graceful man.