It’s official: Rafael Nadal is the King of Clay
Lesson summary
Hi there, welcome to Plain English lesson number 306. I’m Jeff, JR is the producer, and you can find this full lesson at PlainEnglish.com/306.
Coming up today: It was a French Open tennis tournament unlike any other this year, but one thing never changes at Roland Garros: Rafael Nadal won the men’s singles tournament. The expression is “wreak havoc” and we have a funny quote of the week.
Nadal remains the King of Clay
Everything about this year’s French Open tennis tournament was different, except the result of the men’s final: Rafael Nadal won the final in straight sets against rival Novak Djokovic, winning his 100th match and record thirteenth championship on Paris’s famous red clay courts.
It is an unparalleled record of success in a single tennis tournament. No other player has won that many finals victories at a single Grand Slam tennis tournament. Nadal has now won a total of twenty Grand Slam tournaments, tied with Roger Federer for the most ever. Number 3 on that list is Djokovic himself: those three top men’s players—Nadal, Federer and Djokovic—have won 57 out of the last 69 Grand Slam titles, dating back to 2003.
The 34-year-old Rafal Nadal, from the Spanish island of Mallorca, has dominated the French Open the way no other player has dominated a single tournament in modern tennis. The reason is likely due to the surface. Tennis is played on one of three surfaces: grass, the most traditional; a hard court, like what you see in the US Open or the Australian Open; and clay, which is most common in Europe. This is the surface used in tennis tournaments in Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Paris, and cities in Latin America as well.
Each surface plays a little differently, which is why some players perform better on some surfaces. Nadal is unquestionably the King of Clay. On a clay surface, the ball tends to bounce higher and lose its speed after it bounces. Why does that help Nadal? One reason is because he has a great forehand shot. But in tennis, to make a forehand shot, you need to be positioned correctly. When the ball is coming a little slower, as it does on clay, it gives Nadal the time he needs to position himself for his forehand.
As a Spaniard, Nadal also grew up playing on clay courts—literally. He first stepped onto a red-clay court at age four. Spain has over 100,000 red clay courts and even small villages have them. Maybe that’s why he’s so comfortable on the clay courts at Roland Garros, where the French Open is played. Ironically, the Serbian superstar himself has beaten Nadal in the French Open before; that was in 2015. But in this year’s final, he was no match for Nadal. Nadal won the first set 6-0, and while Djokovic did get a little better as the match went on, it was never really a competition.
If the result of the men’s tournament was business as usual, here’s what was different. The tournament was played in the fall, rather than in the spring. They had to postpone it due to COVID-19, so the weather was different; it was much cooler than usual. It was foggy and rainy outside, but for once that didn’t matter: the main stadium at Roland Garros sported a brand-new retractable roof in 2020.
A retractable roof can open and close depending on the weather. Tennis is typically an outdoor sport, but it can’t be played if it’s raining too hard. This can wreak havoc on the tournament schedule if too many games have to be postponed. But this year, the main stadium had a retractable roof. The roof was closed for the men’s final.
The spectators play an interesting role in tennis. Unlike in team sports, you don’t have rabid partisans rooting for one player and against another. The spectators in tennis tend to reward effort; they like to see a good and close match. The loyalties of a tennis crowd can change over the course of a match, and the crowd usually rewards the winner at the end. This time, though, there were only 1,000 spectators allowed to see the final, so like many other sports competitions, the atmosphere on the court was much different without the participation of a large crowd.
And finally, the women’s final. Nineteen-year-old Iga Świątek entered the tournament ranked 54th in the world; she had never won a professional tennis tournament. She defeated the number-one ranked Simona Halep in the fourth round and made it to the finals, where she defeated the number-four ranked Sofia Anna Kennin. Świątek became the youngest person to win the French Open women’s final in almost thirty years. She was Poland’s first tennis player to win a singles championship at a Grand Slam tournament. She did not drop a set in the entire tournament.
A lopsided final
I got up early on a Sunday morning, tuned in at 8:00 am, ready to watch two of the best players fight it out. Djokovic had been playing really well in this abbreviated year and Nadal had been so strong on clay. I was hoping it was going to be a competitive match and I was rooting for Djokovic. But it was not to be. Nadal just dominated from the first game.
We have lots of listeners in Poland, so I bet you are excited about your first Grand Slam tennis champion.
Hey, for those of you in Poland, how’s my pronunciation of Iga Świątek? I listened to it three, four, five times on YouTube before recording this episode, hoping to get it somewhat right. Hopefully I did better than I did with that Japanese word last week, Momijigari.
Well, if the same thing happens to you in English, we have a great tool as part of Plain English Plus+. That tool is our pronunciation exercise. Here’s what we do. I give you a paragraph from the lesson to read out loud. You can record your voice right there on the web site, reading the paragraph. Then, when you’re done, you can replay your voice and play me reading the same paragraph with the correct pronunciation.
And you can bet I don’t pick the easy paragraphs, either! When I pick the paragraphs for this exercise, I always pick the ones with the trickiest words to pronounce. For example, the pronunciation exercise for this lesson has the word “retractable” in it. So you can practice pronouncing all these difficult words right on our web site, listen to yourself, try again, and get better and better at pronunciation.
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