Rafael Nadal's great transformation

After the first practice session in Vina del Mar, Chile, Rafael Nadal's entourage were on the point of despair. Nadal had finally been persuaded to play a low-profile tournament, the VTR Open, but there was a problem.

The throbbing in his bashed-up knees was still ever-present. In fact, he was finding it difficult to see much improvement since the start of his self-imposed exile, seven months earlier. This was grim news. Nadal had already faced the prospect of early retirement once, in 2005, when the Spaniard discovered that he had a defective bone in his left foot.

His father Sebastian suggested quite seriously that he should shift his focus from tennis to golf. But Nadal was only 19 at that point, an age at which the body can bounce back like a rubber ball. This time Nadal was 26 - middle-age in tennis terms - and his mood was one of bleakness and anxiety. Anyone who has read his autobiography will know what a fearful character he is. How he is terrified by thunder and lightning, and will never go out so far into the ocean that he cannot see the bottom - not even on a jet-ski.

Now, however, an even more alarming thought must have crossed his mind. Nadal's sport-loving uncles have been moulding him into a gladiatorial athlete since he was a toddler. His talent was whispered around his native town of Manacor from the age of six. How could he cope if tennis was taken away from him, with so much of his life still to come? "When we went to Vina del Mar, Rafael cannot move too good," Toni Nadal, Rafael's uncle and coach, told The Sunday Telegraph. "We have many problems.

I thought that first, we needed to be good with our physical [condition], but it wasn't. It is difficult when you have no confidence." Nadal was drawn against Federico Delbonis, the world No?128, a player who would ordinarily represent the tiniest of asterisks on the Spaniard's mighty career. In the context of his fitness struggles, however, it represented the key moment of his whole season - the moment when his team finally persuaded him to go out and compete.

That word "comeback" sounds deceptively simple, masking all the doubt and insecurity that accumulates over a long lay-off. But on Feb??5 in Chile, as Nadal carved Delbonis up by a 6-3, 6-2 scoreline, a peculiar alchemy began to unfold. Nadal, even more than most sportsmen, inhabits a split personality.

Off the court, he feels every setback like a knife thrust. He never arrives at a tournament without explaining that he has not had the ideal preparation, without emphasising the quality of the opposition. You might say this is tactical, but over the last 20 years his uncle Toni has programmed him to believe that "every match will be an uphill battle" - in Rafael's own words. Then he goes into the locker room before the match and performs his ritual of transformation: the cold shower, the taping of the racket handles, the tying of the bandana. He emerges as an Aztec warrior, his focus so complete that, even as a youngster, he fought his way through the entirely of the Spanish under-14 championships with a broken finger on his left hand. In Chile, Nadal reached the final of the VTR Open but what ensued must rank as one of the great sports stories of the year: how could Nadal, his career in crisis just four months ago, arrive at the French Open, which starts today, with more wins, more titles and more rankings points than anyone else on the tour? The answer comes down to that phone-box transformation.

As soon as Nadal had arranged his precious water bottles and taken up his position on the baseline, the same pain that had pinned him to the sofa through the winter became manageable, even trivial at times. He might have been tentative at first, reluctant to sprint and hustle with his usual intensity. But each successful match brought another sliver of reassurance, until he was rolling opponents in Madrid and Rome with the old majestic ease. "At first, he can not play a high level," said Toni Nadal, "and we lose the final in Vina del Mar [to world No?73 Horacio Zeballos]. Then he play the final against Nalbandian [in Sao Paolo, Brazil], and he is changing a little. "We still didn't know even if we would go to Acapulco, and we also didn't know about Indian Wells.

His level is better but we need to play more time. But we did go to Acapulco and things were changing properly when he beat Almagro and Ferrer. "For me, that was the biggest surprise, when he beat Ferrer 6-0, 6-2 in the Acapulco final. Because it was the first time we play against one of the best on a clay court, and it was an easy beating. I thought we would lose against David Ferrer. But Rafael is playing very aggressive, really good. Rafael showed he can play against the best players of the world." As we prepare for the French Open to start, at 10am UK time this morning, which Nadal can we expect to see? Some onlookers suggest he has been slightly more brittle since the injury, which has forced him to cut his training schedule back to less than an hour a day.

Certainly there have been times when the juices have not flowed, and our natural response is to murmur that his knees must be bugging him. And yet, even in his best seasons, he did drop the occasional set. "It's fair to say that Rafa lacked consistency early in his comeback," says Mark Petchey, ITV analyst and Andy Murray's former coach. "But sometimes you have to give credit to the other guys, someone like Ernests Gulbis can make life difficult even for a player of Nadal's ability. "When you look at the final in Madrid, and the way Rafa played in Rome, he was hitting the ball as well as I've ever seen him on a clay court. He might argue that he had tournaments in the past where he hardly lost a game, whether in Monte Carlo or Roland Garros. There was a final against Federer where he made seven unforced errors. But if he reproduces his recent level in Paris, I see him winning his eighth French Open in a fortnight's time."