The Athletic has live coverage from Day 6 of the French OpenPARIS – Countless words have been written about Rafael Nadal’s extraordinary fighting spirit in the years since he burst like a charging bull onto the international tennis scene in 2004.Far fewer projects have devoted time to exploring exactly what Nadal was fighting against. Embedded with tennis’ great toreador through the final season of his career, director Zach Heinzerling does just that in the new Netflix docuseries, “Rafa,” released to coincide with the French Open, which he won 14 times.In four episodes, each of roughly an hour, Heinzerling offers an intimate look at Nadal, both the tennis player and the man. The series achieves more introspection than the average sports documentary, and will feel revelatory to anyone who hasn’t followed the 22-time Grand Slam champion’s career in detail. Nadal is not a producer on the series, unlike so many athletes who sanction content about themselves these days.Heinzerling makes the most of his access to such a private figure. He brings the audience into a treatment room where Nadal closes his eyes and sings along to Lady Gaga as he lies on his back while getting his shredded hip worked on. Viewers get to listen in when his coaches and physio huddle away from Nadal to talk in hushed tones about his masochism — or tease him to his face about the number of times he has to pee before a match.Through candid interviews with his coaches, doctors, family members and the two great rivals who helped define his career, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, the documentary puts its audience at the center of the insular inner circle of one of the most famous athletes on the planet.“There’s something kind of old-school and refreshing about Rafa, who said yes to a documentary that was going to see him in really vulnerable situations,” Heinzerling said in an interview Thursday. “He didn’t know what his last season was going to be like. He said to me when I first started in Australia, ‘This could be a total disaster.’”Weaving a trove of archival footage into scenes from Nadal’s 2024 season, the documentary frames Nadal’s career as a ticking time bomb, which also serves as its thesis for why the Spaniard plays with such outstanding intensity.