Rafael Nadal is known for his calm demeanor on and off the court. However, there was a time when that wasn’t the case and it was when he was way younger and just making it as a big star in tennis. Nadal has had to fight accusations of doping few times in his career perhaps because for a regular tennis fan or pundit, it was hard to believe that he could battle or recover from injuries so often and quickly to win the way he has over the years.
At the Wimbledon 2006 Championships, Rafael Nadal was the target of a journalist who did not reveal his identity but claimed outrageously that Nadal used performance enhancers in the tournament. Having dropped merely two sets through the first four rounds, Nadal charged his way into the final-eight stage of the Grand Slam.
As reported by Bruce Jenkins of SFGate, the French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche revealed that an anonymous source claimed that several athletes from numerous sports joined the expelled Tour de France riders in the doping scandal. Apart from five players from the Real Madrid club, the source also accused Rafael Nadal of the same.
Taking offense to the grave allegations, Nadal was furious when asked about the same. Following his quarterfinal win over Jarkko Nieminen, the Spaniard made it pretty clear that he had never doped.
“I have never taken anything in my life and I never will,” said Nadal back then in a press conference at the tournament. “I am well enough educated in the sporting world and outside not to cheat. People who write lies about other people are bad people. (The unnamed source) is a coward.”
Nadal would go on to defeat Marcos Baghdatis 6-1, 7-5, 6-3 in the semifinals to make his first finals appearance at Wimbledon. Eventually, Roger Federer handed Rafael Nadal a tough 0-6, 6-7, 7-6, 3-6 defeat to lift the Wimbledon 2006 trophy.
Rafael Nadal spoke about anti-doping in 2016 too
During the Madrid Open 2016, Rafael Nadal had yet another encounter with accusations related to doping. This time, Rafa wanted the International Tennis Federation to publish his doping records to prove his innocence.
“The sport should be clean and must look clean, no? Should be, in my opinion – always in my opinion – much better for the transparency of the sport in general to say, you know, Rafa Nadal is passing an anti-doping control today and the result going to be in two weeks. In the result, you publish the results. The anti-doping control is negative. That’s it,” Nadal said, as per Sportskeeda.
