There’ll never be another tennis hunk like Rafael Nadal

In the pantheon of all-time tennis hunks, Rafael Nadal sits at the apex. The hunkiest ever to do it. In his prime, which remarkably lasted close to two decades, he seemed to conceal within the archetypal Mediterranean love god physique a kind of tennis supercomputer, capable almost always of finding impossible-seeming angles from which to smash winners. Adonis with a magic racket, in other words. He was thrilling to watch.

This status, hunkmeister-in-chief, was apparently not lost on the Spaniard. In 2018, he shut down a journalist’s whining about the gender pay gap in tennis with the same disdain he might block an attempted winner at the net. ‘Female models earn more than male models, and nobody says anything. Why? Because they have a larger following. In tennis, too, who gathers the larger audience earns more.’ Quite. It was about the only controversial thing he ever said publicly.