Dignity in defeat: Why Nadal's my favourite male athlete of 2024

Tell your kids stories about people as they grow up. Tell them about Aristotle, Madam Curie, Alexander the Great, Galileo, Muhammad Ali, Jane Austen. Tell them about achievers and adventurers, on horseback and in laboratories, who invented, conquered, were arrested and honoured.

- Rohit Brijnath

But spare an hour one day to tell them also about lefty's leaving.

You know him, creases running down his eyes as he smiled, fingers taped, bald spot expanding, staples holding his body together finally falling off. Tell them not just about Rafael Nadal's best days but his last days in 2024.

Tell them in 2024, athletes wove magic and stoked revolutions. They did it with balls (basketball's Caitlin Clark), on a mat (judoka Teddy Riner) and holding a racket (An Se-young). They lifted us (vaulter Armand Duplantis) and made their families weep. Golf's Xander Schauffele won his first Major, called his dad and said "I had to hang up pretty quickly because he started to make me cry".

But tell your kids that winning is never the only story to sport. It's a reductive view of a profound activity, whose poetry lies also in defeat, injury, faith, persistence. So many examinations must be endured till a final reckoning arrives, when the great athlete is confronted by his own irrelevance.

Hello, mortal, the mirror tells him. And how he looks vincibility in the eye tells you about character. This is also sport.