On this day: Rafael Nadal cracks top-10 for the first time at the age of 18
Kicking off 2003 season from just outside the top-200, the 16-year-old Rafael Nadal needed less than four months to cut his ranking position in half and continue his stellar progress towards the best players in the world. After 19 Challenger wins (four finals, including the title in Barletta) and the third-round result in Monte Carlo, Rafa cracked the top-100 in April and continued to charge in the following months at such a young age, securing the place among the 50 chosen players in August. Despite a nasty injury that halted his rise in the spring of 2004, Rafa managed to win the first ATP title in August that year and to keep his ranking position ahead of 2005 when he set eyes on big targets, competing in the fourth round of the Australian Open before conquering Costa do Sauipe and Acapulco.
The best was yet to come for an extraordinary teenager, standing two points away from winning the title in Miami and going all the way in Monte Carlo for his first Masters 1000 crown. Eager for more of that, Rafa headed to Barcelona with no rest and stood as the last man on Sunday, beating Juan Carlos Ferrero in straight sets (the best-of-five final) to grab another title and additional 300 points that sent him into the top-10 for the first time in a career. At the age of 18 years and ten months, Rafa became the eighth-youngest player in the top-10 since the start of the ATP ranking in 1973 behind Krickstein, Chang, Becker, Borg, Wilander, Agassi and Medvedev and the only at that age after 1993.
Entering the top-10 on April 25, 2005, Rafael Nadal has never left that group, standing on 731 consecutive weeks in the elite group for the third-longest Open era streak behind Jimmy Connors and Roger Federer whom he will pass in four weeks. Almost 680 of those weeks have seen Rafa in the top-5 and he has proven himself as one of the most consistent players in the history of our game, raising the bar high for the upcoming youngsters who will have to stay at the top of their games for almost 15 years to match Nadal's numbers.
from Tennis World USA http://bit.ly/2vpc6cd
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