Nadal lost to the Williams sisters at badminton three summers in a row. Venus later trained at his academy in Mallorca, where he returns to the court on Oct. 3.
Wimbledon 2008 is the only Grand Slam tournament that Rafael Nadal and Venus Williams won in the same year. Venus beat her sister Serena 7-5, 6-4 in the women’s final on Saturday, July 5, for her fifth Wimbledon singles title. A day later, Nadal won his first, beating Roger Federer in a final that lasted 4 hours and 48 minutes and ended in near darkness. At the Champions Dinner that followed, held at the InterContinental on London’s Park Lane, the two posed with their trophies in a photo distributed by the All England Club.
Their Grand Slam singles titles, by year:
| Tournament | Venus Williams | Rafael Nadal |
|---|---|---|
| Wimbledon | 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007, 2008 | 2008, 2010 |
| U.S. Open | 2000, 2001 | 2010, 2013, 2017, 2019 |
| French Open | None | 2005-08, 2010-14, 2017-20, 2022 |
| Australian Open | None | 2009, 2022 |
Men and women play on separate tours, so the two never met in an official match. They have played each other at badminton, though, and Venus has trained at Nadal’s academy, which hosts his return to the court on Saturday, Oct. 3.
Most of the public comments between them run one way. Venus has spoken or posted about Nadal several times, while The Notable Daily could not find comparable public remarks from Nadal about her. In November 2009, after Nikolay Davydenko beat him at the season-ending finals in London, she wrote on Twitter: “Poor rafa wasnt at his best. i know what thats like. the season is so long.”
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Nadal’s three badminton losses to the Williams sisters
For several summers, the Lotte New York Palace hosted a pre-U.S. Open invitational where tennis players traded their rackets for badminton ones on a temporary court at the hotel.
Venus played Nadal there in August 2017. Vogue reported that she was declared the winner after a disputed finish, even though Nadal landed the final shot.
A year later, Serena drew Nadal for the last game of the evening. Each game lasted three minutes. Serena led for almost all of it, Nadal tied the score with seven seconds left, and she won 13-12 with a shot that dropped just out of his reach as time ran out, according to Vogue. Venus beat Nick Kyrgios the same night and told the magazine she knew “nothing about badminton except the game I played here last year.”
That summer, Condรฉ Nast Traveler also interviewed Venus and Nadal at the hotel about travel. Both mentioned scuba diving. Nadal said he keeps going back to Cozumel, Mexico, to dive, and Venus said she wanted to dive in Thailand and see a whale shark.
In August 2019, the sisters played as a team. Nadal started their doubles game with Today co-host Dylan Dreyer as his partner, and 15-year-old Coco Gauff replaced her midway through. Venus and Serena won, People reported.
Nadal, Williams and equal prize money
Williams led the push for equal prize money at Wimbledon. In 2005, the day before she won that year’s title, she made her case to the Grand Slam Board in the All England Club’s boardroom. Wimbledon agreed to pay men and women the same in early 2007, and that summer she became the first women’s champion there to earn as much as the men’s winner.
Their one public disagreement came in June 2018. Nadal had told an Italian magazine that “female models earn more than male models and nobody says anything,” because they have a larger following, and that “in tennis too, who gathers a larger audience earns more.” When TIME’s Sean Gregory read her those comments, she answered in two sentences:
“I don’t know anything about modeling. I guess that’s a metaphor that makes sense to him.”
Nadal made the same case in February 2024, in an interview with Ana Pastor on the Spanish channel La Sexta. Speaking in Spanish, he said equality is not about handouts, and that if Serena Williams generated more money than he did, he would want her to earn more than him.
At Nadal’s academy in Mallorca
Williams lost in the first round at Wimbledon in July 2023. Later that month she was in Manacor, training at the Rafa Nadal Academy ahead of the Canadian Open, where she had a wild card. The academy welcomed her on social media on July 21. Nadal’s sister Maribel, now the academy’s deputy general manager, shared a photo of Williams training in an Instagram story with the words “Welcome Venus Williams,” Tennis World USA reported.
During her stay she worked on court with Joan Bosch, one of the academy’s technical directors. Bosch met Nadal and his uncle Toni at the Balearic School of Sport, and he later spent seven years coaching Carlos Moyรก, the former world No. 1 who became Nadal’s coach for the 2017 season and stayed through the end of Nadal’s career.
Bosch now coaches Alex Eala, a Filipina who joined the academy in 2018 and graduated in 2023. Eala and Williams played doubles together twice this summer. They reached the quarterfinals in Bad Homburg in June and lost in the first round in Toronto in August.
Venus Williams on Nadal’s French Open farewell
Williams joined TNT as an analyst for the 2025 French Open. On one broadcast, she was asked about the ceremony Roland Garros had held for Nadal the night before on Court Philippe-Chatrier, where Federer, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray joined him.
Of the four men together on court, she said, “They changed tennis.” She added that Nadal deserved a celebration every year for each of his French Open titles, then stopped to check whether there were 13 or 14. Told there were 14, she said, “He needs 14 years of celebrating.”
Where Nadal and Williams are now
Williams, 46, is still competing. At the U.S. Open, her first-round singles loss to Sofia Kenin ended at 2:01 a.m., the latest finish for a first-round match in the tournament’s history, according to The Associated Press. Asked afterward whether she was thinking about her future, she said, “I don’t think I should have to.” On Sept. 4, she and Serena lost their first-round doubles match in a deciding tiebreak in Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Nadal retired at the Davis Cup Finals in Mรกlaga in November 2024. When CNBC asked him in June whether Serena Williams’ return to the tour tempted him, he said, “That chapter is closed.”
He will still play on Saturday. The Rafa Nadal Academy Slam, a doubles exhibition marking the academy’s 10th anniversary, puts Team Rafa against a team captained by Murray, starting at 4:30 p.m. local time (10:30 a.m. ET). The academy has named Richard Gasquet for Nadal’s side and Dominic Thiem and Marat Safin for Murray’s, with three of the eight places still to be announced. The free tickets are gone, and the event will stream exclusively on Spain’s Movistar Plus.
The academy says it will be Nadal’s first match in front of a crowd since Mรกlaga.
