Rafa docu-series is a stirring, if incomplete, study of the suffering of Nadal

He’s speaking in Spanish, at a distance across the net, but as he misses a shot in practice the subtitles in English are clear.

“F***.”

There’s no hiding here, it isn’t going well. It’s 2024, his career is concluding and he can’t be the player he used to be. He can’t remake himself one last time. He knows how to suffer but this is beyond suffering. This is age, a rival even more relentless than him, and so he, nearly 38, does what Rafael Nadal never does in public.

He swears.

Yes, he’s human, too.

The camera in Rafa, the four-part documentary on Netflix, is everywhere: In his house, the car, the court, the locker room. It meets his supporting cast – his parents, uncle Toni, wife Maria, doctor, entourage, Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic – it catches his struggle with pain, his coterie’s calming of him, the defeat in his eyes in one searing moment while in a car and his nervous peeing.

But does Rafa get inside Nadal? Not entirely. Perhaps we don’t witness enough of a Nadal we haven’t seen before, we just see more clearly the Nadal we once knew. We knew he could suffer, but here we travel into the insides of this conflict with his disobedient body, into MRI machines and X-ray reports, into meetings with doctors, into stories of his father carrying him once because he is hurting so much, into a rage within him which somehow overcomes it all.

In sports’ 10,000-hour theory which became fashionable for a while, it was argued that practice for those many hours was necessary to find greatness. We can debate this endlessly, but Nadal is an argument beyond this. He did the necessary labour, often not being given water for the first hour of practice by uncle Toni (who sees work as the solution to everything), yet Nadal has something more, extra, special, unique, some mysterious substance whose ingredients are teachings, genetics and stuff we don’t know.

Either way it is stunning. Will always is.

We tend to build athletes into gods and machines because we cannot comprehend humans can do these things. Yet this is a human nonetheless, who once says “in the basement of failure, there’s always one more floor”, a human whose anxiety is so profound he sees a psychiatrist and during one period constantly needs water to swallow for his mouth is so dry. It’s astonishing isn’t it, that a man with a fragile body can forge himself into a sporting warrior that even distant planets must have heard of.

In 2005 his foot breaks and thereafter pain is his shadow and it will lead him to numbing injections, an orthotic in his shoe and so many painkillers that he has two perforations in his intestine. For 20 years he plays with pain and it speaks of a remarkable capacity to endure.

So what fuels him? Not trophies but the striving for them, to be in the arena, to have the chance to scrap, to enjoy walking that hectic, harrowing line between defeating and being defeated. “I am not a winner,” he says poignantly once, “I am a competitor.”

I was slightly apprehensive about the documentary because Netflix and Amazon Prime and other platforms are crammed with them. Most are not serious studies, but indulgent, quick compilations which involve the polishing of a public image. First hire the cameras, then think of a story.

But exceptions exist. There’s When We Were Kings on Muhammad Ali, Free Solo which is the spectacular filming of Alex Honnold’s rope-less ascent of El Capitan, and Man On Wire, which follows the French tightrope walker Philippe Petit, who flies to New York in 1974, incredibly and illegally strings a wire across the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre and walks across it. All three won best documentary Oscars.

The Last Dance, chronicling Michael Jordan’s heated appetite for the contest, took home an Emmy, and the gifted Asif Kapadia, who also made the Maradona documentary, won a British academy award for Senna. Kapadia was a detective, hunting for footage, finding it – as he told Filmmaker magazine – from Maradona’s former wife, Claudia Villafane (“there’s stuff in the back room”) and a fan in Naples.

Rafa is gripping and moving and yet not quite of the same quality. It is more potent than Federer: Twelve Final Days, yet allows suffering to become an over-repetitive refrain across four hours. Perhaps it might have surveilled more ground, dug deeper into his opinion on uncle Toni’s methods, brought more detail to how he expanded his game, and interrogated other players about the psychological stress of confronting him on clay.

I watched Rafa because in so many ways I am not over Nadal yet. In 40 years of sportswriting I have rarely witnessed anyone like him, as original a work as you might find in the Prado Museum in Madrid. Perhaps now, after seeing close-up his struggles with injury, I ask with even greater amazement than I did when he played.

How?