Italian translation at settesei.it
By now you’ve heard: Rafael Nadal will miss the US Open. It’s hardly a surprise, as Rafa hasn’t played a match since Wimbledon, and his knee has kept him off the tour for long periods in the past.
What is remarkable is the rarity of a top player missing the Open. Despite its position near the end of the ATP schedule, after eight months of grueling tennis in which every player picks up his share of nagging injuries, New York gets a better turnout from top-10 players than any of the other three slams.
In fact, Nadal is only the third top-three player since 1991 to skip Flushing. In 1999, #1-ranked Pete Sampras couldn’t play, and in 2004, it was #3-ranked Guillermo Coria who stayed home. In the tournament’s last 21 editions, a top-ten player has missed the event only ten times.
It’s interesting to speculate as to why top players manage to show up in Flushing at a rate unmatched elsewhere. Surely the event doesn’t have more cachet than Wimbledon. Certainly the multiple shifts of surface throughout the spring and summer test every player’s mental and physical stamina. Perhaps the longish break between Wimbledon and the Open allows players to take time off if they need it. Most men play Canada and Cincinnati, but as we’ve seen this year, plenty of guys are willing to miss either one, meaning that only a serious injury keeps one out of the New York draw.
Defying conventional wisdom even further, the slam with the second-best turnout among top players is the French, not Wimbledon. Since 1991, only 13 top-tenners have missed Roland Garros, and three of those were Boris Becker.
Wimbledon may be synonymous with the sport of tennis, but it is a distant third, with 25 top-tenners missing from the last 22 draws. Here the no-shows are more logical: Alex Corretja three times, Marcelo Rios twice, Sergi Bruguera four times. In the late 1990s, some guys simply didn’t consider the All-England Club a must.
Australia is a bit further back in fourth, with 29 top-tenners who didn’t play. Melbourne does seem to have the least cachet of the four big events, but the tide may be turning. Since 2006, only one top-ten player, Nikolay Davydenko in 2009, failed to make an appearance.
It may seem that absences from Grand Slams are random, driven by accidents such as major injuries that can happen at any time. Any single absence surely does look that way. There are larger forces at work, however–the value associated with certain tournaments, the demands of the schedule leading to physical breakdowns at some times and not others–that are not random. In one more way, Rafael Nadal is proving himself a unique player, missing the most unmissable slam on the ATP calendar.