Rafael Nadal loses to 50th-ranked Lloyd Harris at Citi Open

The good news for Rafael Nadal was that his painful left foot felt much better Thursday at the Citi Open. The bad news? His debut appearance at the tournament ended after two rough outings.

A day after needing three sets and more than three hours to get by at the hard-court tuneup for the U.S. Open, Nadal was eliminated 6-4, 1-6, 6-4 under the lights by 50th-ranked Lloyd Harris of South Africa.

“I need to keep working,” Nadal said.

He is a 20-time Grand Slam champion. Harris has only once made it as far as the third round at a major.

“All the credit to him that he played aggressive,” Nadal said. “He played well. He was brave.”

The 24-year-old Harris is 6-foot-4 with big serves that regularly topped 120 mph and produced 16 aces Thursday. “His serve,” Nadal said, “was huge.”

Nadal’s, admittedly, was not. That might be a sign of rust, which would be understandable given that the 35-year-old Spaniard hadn’t competed anywhere in nearly two months — not even picking up his racket for about three weeks after a semifinal loss to Novak Djokovic at the French Open.

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Nadal skipped Wimbledon and the Tokyo Olympics and certainly never quite played the way he can during his first trip to the U.S. capital.

Thursday’s match ended when Nadal got broken for the second time, with Harris dropping his racket in disbelief after delivering a lob winner to close the proceedings.

“I played this last game really bad,” said Nadal, a 20-time Grand Slam champion who was seeded No. 1 in Washington. “My serve was not working the proper way.”

This was less of a physical tug-of-war between a pair of heavy hitters than Nadal’s triumph over 192nd-ranked Jack Sock on Wednesday.

The one bit of good news for Nadal on Thursday was that he said his injured foot felt better.

About 3½ hours before entering the U.S. Open tuneup’s main stadium to face Harris, Nadal had made his way to tiny Court 5 for a training session.

As fans shouted “Vamos, Rafa!” and snapped photos and video with their phones from the stands at an adjacent court, Nadal didn’t do much running, mostly staying in place while hitting groundstrokes and practicing volleys, serves and returns for 45 minutes with Emilio Gomez, a 29-year-old from Ecuador who is ranked 165th and lost in the Citi Open’s first round.

Not at all taxing by Nadal’s usual exacting and exhausting standards.

And versus Harris, when the points mattered, it took Nadal a bit to get going. It wasn’t really until the second set that he really seemed into it, as did the fans, many of whom rose to salute when Nadal broke to lead 3-1 with a forehand passing winner.

But down the stretch in the third set, it was Nadal, surprisingly, who faltered. He now will try to regroup ahead of the U.S. Open, which he missed last year during the pandemic but won the last time he entered, in 2019.

Harris, meanwhile, continues the pursuit of a first ATP title, which would leave him 87 behind Nadal’s total.

“To be honest, tennis-wise, I did a lot of good things,” Harris said. “I think the best thing was to stay in the moment, keep my composure.”

Next for him is a match against 2015 Citi Open champion and 2014 U.S. Open finalist Kei Nishikori on Friday.

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