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PARIS – Countless words have been written about Rafael Nadal’s extraordinary fighting spirit in the years since he burst like a charging bull onto the international tennis scene in 2004.
Far fewer projects have devoted time to exploring exactly what Nadal was fighting against. Embedded with tennis’ great toreador through the final season of his career, director Zach Heinzerling does just that in the new Netflix docuseries, “Rafa,” released to coincide with the French Open, which he won 14 times.
In four episodes, each of roughly an hour, Heinzerling offers an intimate look at Nadal, both the tennis player and the man. The series achieves more introspection than the average sports documentary, and will feel revelatory to anyone who hasn’t followed the 22-time Grand Slam champion’s career in detail. Nadal is not a producer on the series, made by Skydance Sports, unlike so many athletes who sanction content about themselves these days.
Heinzerling makes the most of his access to such a private figure. He brings the audience into a treatment room where Nadal closes his eyes and sings along to Lady Gaga as he lies on his back while getting his shredded hip worked on. Viewers get to listen in when his coaches and physio huddle away from Nadal to talk in hushed tones about his masochism — or tease him to his face about the number of times he has to pee before a match.
Through candid interviews with his coaches, doctors, family members and the two great rivals who helped define his career, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, the documentary puts its audience at the center of the insular inner circle of one of the most famous athletes on the planet.
“There’s something kind of old-school and refreshing about Rafa, who said yes to a documentary that was going to see him in really vulnerable situations,” Heinzerling said in an interview Thursday. “He didn’t know what his last season was going to be like. He said to me when I first started in Australia, ‘This could be a total disaster.’”
Weaving a trove of archival footage into scenes from Nadal’s 2024 season, the documentary frames Nadal’s career as a ticking time bomb, which also serves as its thesis for why the Spaniard plays with such outstanding intensity.
Nadal was diagnosed with Mueller-Weiss syndrome early in his career, a rare degenerative condition that attacks the navicular bone in the foot. From a young age, Nadal felt he was racing against the clock to squeeze as much out of his time on a tennis court as possible.
He was only able to continue playing by wearing a custom orthotic, which later contributed to countless other injuries — his knees, his back and his hips — that led to chronic, torturous pain that the documentary recounts in intense, relentless detail.
“I’m destroyed. I’m destroyed,” Nadal says quietly at one moment in 2024, staring into the distance. Later, the documentary shows a golf-ball sized lump protruding from the top of Nadal’s foot. In an interview, he admits to having taken so many anti-inflammatories over the years — despite the protestations of his longtime physiotherapist, Rafael Maymó — that he has holes in his intestines.
“I think the possibility that he was causing himself harm, being the way he is, it’s a hard thing for him to admit,” Heinzerling said. “Twenty years with the same team. All of the secrets are locked in the vault.”
Rafael Nadal’s left foot was so painful that he numbed it on his run to the 2022 French Open title. (Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP via Getty Images)
“Rafa” delves into Nadal’s mental health throughout his life, including the effect his formative longtime coach, his Uncle Toni, had when he conditioned a young Nadal to equate suffering with success.
Here, there’s a lingering sense Nadal either has not fully processed his experience growing up under his uncle’s tutelage, or isn’t willing to share his thoughts on it. The documentary shows how Toni trained him — no water for the first hour of practice was one rule as a child — through Nadal’s narration. Nadal’s mother raises the idea that Toni’s treatment might have been on too extreme. But viewers don’t hear what Nadal thinks of Toni’s methods now.
The documentary also discusses Nadal’s management of anxiety, part of Heinzerling’s mission to humanize him as he works to explain how Nadal became a tennis deity on-court. Nadal, with a wink, recites the various physical tics involved in his serving routine.
He’s shown as a lovesick teenager, waiting for his crush, Mery, who is now his wife, to respond to a text. There is ample footage of Nadal playing with his baby son, interspersed with his talking about the isolating nature of tennis and debating whether he should end his career, though viewers never hear his thoughts on life as a father.
Just when the documentary has shown enough of Nadal’s happy life outside tennis that viewers begin to question why he continues physically torturing himself by playing, Nadal explains.
“For me, it’s simple. I’m exploring my limits,” he says.
Had he not explored everything – the orthotics, the anti-inflammatories, the shots that numbed his foot in his final season – “I probably would have ten fewer Grand Slams,” Nadal says.
“I’m not saying one or two, I’m saying ten or twelve. This is the reality.”
After nearly four hours painting Nadal as equal parts humble and tortured, tennis’s great endurance athlete who suffers for the love of the game, the documentary lets viewers in on a secret: Some part of him does care about how the numbers stack up. That does as much humanizing as any insightful scene about his struggles.
Rafael Nadal took part in a retirement ceremony at the 2025 French Open. (SIPA via Imagn Images)
Riding in the car with Mery, sometime after his first-round loss to Alexander Zverev at the 2024 French Open, Nadal muses that his record of 14 titles at Roland Garros will be harder to break than the record of 24 Grand Slam singles titles, which Novak Djokovic holds.
Heinzerling said it was the only time in his months spent with Nadal he could get the player to say anything remotely complimentary about himself.
“I think in that moment, when he was sensing the end, and he was around people he was comfortable with, he was proud of his accomplishments,” Heinzerling said.
“And it was a signifier that the end was near. The most revealing aspect of that scene for me, was his confidence. He is proud of what he’s done.”
