During his French Open triumph, he was injected for two weeks. For Nadal it is clear: It will not go on like this. What is behind the foot disease that could now end his career abruptly?
Rafael Nadal struggled for his 14th victory at the French Open in Paris. The triumph in Roland Garros was only possible with painkillers. As revealed by the Spaniard, he was splashed out throughout the tournament. Nadal doesn’t want to do that again. “I can’t and don’t want to continue because of the circumstances I’m playing in. I played with syringes for two weeks. I got them before every match.”
In the semifinals against Alexander Zverev, Nadal could see that he went well beyond his pain threshold. Already in the first set, which went into the tie break, the Spaniard took short breaks and contacted his personal doctor. Nadal himself said about the treatment of his personal doctor: “I received anesthetic injections. The effect was that the foot was dead. So I had no feeling in my foot.” Nadal’s left foot is affected. He suffers from the so-called Müller-Weiss -Syndrome.
This is a disease of the metatarsal skeleton, more precisely the navicular bone. The Swiss sports doctor Dr. Med. Walter O. Frey explains to the “Blick”: “The navicular bone is a bone in the tarsal area. This can become ill, which is then called Müller-Weis syndrome. Ill in such a way that part of it gradually begins to die off .” What exactly triggers the death of bone tissue has not yet been researched. Drugs that stop this degeneration do not yet exist.
Nadal has been affected since 2005
The scaphoid has an essential function for the stability of the foot. Frey: “The foot has an arch, like the arch in an archway, where the individual components support themselves. If one of these parts is no longer its full size, then the archway begins to collapse and can even collapse completely.”
The consequences can be serious, as the doctor further explains: “The navicular bone is in the middle of the archway. If this bone, typically in the inner area, begins to collapse, then this bone breaks through and the entire arch of the foot can collapse.”
Nadal has been suffering from this condition since 2005 and was able to alleviate it for some time with special insoles. Instead of the injections, the left-hander now wants to try one last conservative method. “It will be a radiofrequency injection on the two nerves that affect the impact of the foot. We will try to burn the nerve a little to create the effect that I had in Paris during these two weeks.”
If the treatment does not work, he is threatened with an operation, the success of which is in the stars. Nadal: “If it works with an anti-inflammatory drug, I will play in Wimbledon. If not, I ask myself whether there is a major operation through which nobody can guarantee me whether it will happen again.”
