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Sporting Life
On a Shanghai tennis court, an education in grace
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Emotional cousins: France’s Arthur Rinderknech (right) on stage with Monaco's Valentin Vacherot after the Shanghai Masters final.
PHOTO: AFP
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Grace can be hard, but that’s precisely what makes it alluring. You have to find it when you least feel like it. You have to show it when you’re down, beaten, lost, saliva congealing in a dry mouth after a long match. You have to extract it when self-esteem’s leaking like sweat.
No professional athlete wants losing to become a habit, but somehow they make grace into one. Certainly he does, this beaten-up, breaking-apart champion, for whom winning was a mad, consuming, validating, vitalising thing. But now the precision machine inside him is broken, his deterioration clear in a quarter-step loss of speed, yet somehow he’s kept his grip on grace.
