PARIS, May 27, 2016

Rafael Nadal withdraws from Roland Garros on Friday afternoon. The fourth seed was scheduled to meet fellow countryman Marcel Granollers in the third round, who will advance to the round of the last 16 via walkover. The Spaniard will face the winner of the match between Alexander Zverev and Dominic Thiem.

“I’m here to announce that I have to retire from the tournament because I have a problem in my wrist that I have had a couple of weeks. Every day that happens is stronger, and I arrived here with a little bit of pain but something that I think I was able to manage,” Nadal stated in Paris.

“Every day was a little bit worse. We tried to do all the treatments possible. Every single day we spent a lot of hours here working so hard to try to play. I could play, but the thing is that yesterday night I started to feel more and more pain, and today in the morning I feel that I could not move much the wrist. So I came here, I did MRI, and I did echography and the results are not positive,” the Spaniard continued.

“Every day the image is a little bit worse. It’s obvious that if it’s not Roland Garros I would have probably not taken any risks on playing the first two days, but it is the most important event of the year for me so we tried our best. We took risks yesterday. That’s why we played with anesthetic injection, so without feeling at all on the wrist.

“To win the tournament, I need five more matches, and the doctor says that’s 100% impossible. So if I continue playing, then it would be impossible for me to finish the tournament. There is no chance that I can even practice today. That’s it. I have to take that very bad decision for me, but just that’s part of the life, part of my career, too.

I am gonna keep going hard to recover as quick as possible and try to come back the next couple of years, having some more opportunities,” said Nadal and added that there will be no surgery at the moment. He hopes to get fit again for Wimbledon.