Rafael Nadal

The thing, when you’re down two sets to love, is to stay calm, even though it’s hard, because people are freaking out, people are worried for you.

You fight, you try your best, but if you lose, you dont have to break five racquets and smash up the locker room. You can do those things, but when youve finished, nothings changed. Youve still lost. If something positive came from that, I probably would do it. But I see only negativity.

We should try to teach the young people values that are useful to them whether they become professional athletes or not.

Anyone could become a star, but everyone must be a human being.

It should not be a child’s only goal to become the best player in the world. That would be a bad, a harmful attitude.

I will do as I usually do. Tomorrow is going to be a day like any other day.

For sure, with golf it’s not a physically demanding sport like tennis. That’s what makes tennis great – you combine both things. It’s a very mental sport and at the same time can be dramatically physical. But I do admire the mentality of sport more than the physicality because physical performance is much easier to practice than mental performance.

The glory is being happy. The glory is not winning here or winning there. The glory is enjoying practicing, enjoy every day, enjoying to work hard, trying to be a better player than before.

When one player is better than you, at this moment, the only thing you can do is work, try to find solutions and try to wait a little bit for your time. I’m going to wait and I’m going to try a sixth time. And if the sixth doesn’t happen, a seventh. It’s going to be like this. That’s the spirit of sport.

I’m not a God, I make mistakes.

Something that works for one person could be a disadvantage to another.

Girls had never been important. I’d had a girlfriend or two and had liked them a lot but it wasn’t love, because my first love was tennis.

It’s not that difficult to play well and win titles in a team like Barcelona, but it’s in the national side where you see a player’s true class. That was the case with figures like Pele, Diego Maradona and Zinedine Zidane. With Spain, Iniesta has shown that he is among the best players of all time and that’s why I rate him higher than Messi or Ronaldo. Even though the latter two have incredible scoring records for their clubs, they still haven’t won anything with Argentina or Portugal respectively.

I go to the gym, I swim daily and from time to time I meet with friends and do extra-curricular stuff.

I swim almost every day, a thousand meters.

When you are thrown onto the stage at 17 in such an enormous way, it becomes living on the edge because every step you take, every word you speak, every action you do becomes headline news. And it became, for me, life or death.

The boys are so powerful off of the baseline now that they don’t have to come to the net to finish points. That’s the reason we went to the net. To finish the point. Nowadays, even the big guys can hit winners four feet behind the baseline.

Thats the hard part about sport: as men we havent started to be in our prime, but as athletes we are old people. I needed support. I lost trust and did stupid things.

Where do you go when you’re the best in the world? What’s next?

More than anything, believe that you can win.

You know, a lot of things changed. What never changed is the illusion to keep playing tennis, the illusion to keep doing well the things, and the illusion to be in a good position of the ranking and play these kind of matches.