“You cannot collapse, either because you’ve won a match or because you’ve lost it. This is sport, and you can have victories or defeats. No one remembers defeats in the long run. People remember victories. Defeats never make you grow, but you also realise how difficult what I achieved up until today was, and this is something you need sometimes. You need a defeat to give value to your victories,” he said in a post-match press conference that is usually the venue for bland banalities, showing he had chosen to take from his loss a philosophical lesson about life as a sportsman.

In a tennis world divided between two colossal talents, the rift between fans of Federer and Nadal is growing even more rapidly than their rivalry is evolving. They are compared on everything — their forehand, backhand, athleticism, will to win, their mastery of each surface, their on and off-field demeanour; Elegance vs Grit, Genius vs Labour, Beauty vs the Beast.

But for all the mesmerising shots in Federer’s arsenal, for all the sublime talent at his disposal, it seemed over the last year that he needed something more, something extra, something entirely unique to break out of the hold that Nadal had over him. Even his most ardent fans did not expect him to win in France, not because of his relative frailty on clay but because of Nadal’s total domination of the surface, and of Federer himself.

It was in such a scenario, where just a matter of another whipping of Federer seemed to stand between Nadal and the title, that the Spaniard was felled by Sweden’s Robin Soderling, with whom he has an interesting history. Nadal’s grief would’ve been tremendous as his shield of invincibility was breached once and for all. And that is why his gesture of humility after the loss becomes more significant at a time when teams racially abuse each other, when players slap one another, and when a former England cricket captain rants about the drawbacks of rap music and “multicultural” societies.

... contd.