Nick Kyrgios details Rafael Nadal’s locker room routine that left him intimidated

It was on the ‘Wimbledon Unfiltered’ podcast where Nick Kyrgios made his recent comments about Nadal’s behaviour in the locker room.

“Rafa was a nightmare before you played him because he would get his racket and he would swing really hard in front of you and try to intimidate you.

“It did work, because you’re sitting there, maybe listening to music, and you just hear this guy’s racket zooming, he’s jumping around. He made you feel a bit nervous.”

The Australian revealed he once filmed the Spaniard’s unusual warm-up routine before beating him at the 2007 Cincinnati Masters.

“I videoed it one time, I think I’ve got it on my social media, I was videoing him warming up in the background at Cincinnati. Then I destroyed him, so it was fine.”

Even when few were giving him much of a chance, Kyrgios showed no doubt and managed to back it up on more than one occasion. He has beaten Nadal three times and lost six times.

In their rivalry, Nadal soon realised that he could not underestimate the Australian after being knocked out at Wimbledon in 2014. Kyrgios was only 19 years old at the time and defied all odds to advance in four sets. Ten years later, the tennis world is still talking about it.

Nick Kyrgios admits he purposefully knocked Rafael Nadal’s water bottles over

Kyrgios confessed that he didn’t view players like Nadal and Roger Federer the same way many others did. Since he wasn’t a proper tennis fan in his younger days, he found it difficult to put them on a pedestal. This gave him more freedom to compete against them and to use unorthodox strategies to win.

“I think with me, it was that I didn’t respect them as much as the other tennis players, because I did not watch tennis when I was growing up. I never went to any of the Grand Slams. Tennis was not in my family at all; my parents were not good at tennis. My siblings tried to play, and they were pretty average.

“So when I saw Nadal and Federer and these gods for the first time, most of these tennis players live and breathe tennis, but with me, I kind of was just good at it and I just trained and ended up there. So, I just saw them as other guys.”

For example, whenever they played, Kyrgios would go out of his way to disrupt one of Nadal’s key routines.

“When I saw his bottles and they had to be in the exact same position, I was like, who does this guy think he is? I knocked the bottles over,” he revealed.