Afternoon:
9°c
Not for 20 years has individual sport known a shock as seismic as Rafael Nadal's French Open defeat and the primary emotion - for me, as for Roger Federer and Andy Murray - was relief. The last time the Richter scale measured something of this magnitude was in 1990, when 42-1 James 'Buster' Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson in Tokyo.
So crushingly inevitable was a quick Tyson win that I didn't bother staying up, refused to believe a friend who rang with the result, and after seeing the replay was convinced that Jonathan Routh had faked the whole thing for Candid Camera.
I did watch yesterday's events from Roland Garros, hence the relief, although it's still a struggle to accept that Nadal, history's most destructive and indomitable clay courter, was dominated and destroyed by a journeyman in the Buster Douglas mould.
With hindsight, there had been an omen. In Madrid recently, Nadal was listless and out of sorts all week before meekly succumbing to Roger Federer in the final. However, Madrid's clay is quick and low-bouncing like the Hamburg surface on which Nadal lost to Federer two years ago before storming to his third French Open, so no one took much notice.
And even if anyone secretly felt that Nadal - winner of 31 matches and 32 sets in a row in Paris until yesterday - could be kept from a fifth straight title, who believed that a talented but underachieving nobody like Robin Soderling, could do the preventing?
Soderling would seem the glib answer to that one. This obnoxious young Swede doesn't care for Nadal, with whom he clashed bitterly during a Wimbledon five-setter in 2007, and he came out swinging like an angry man with a sore ego and a score to settle.
Settle it, quite brilliantly, he eventually did. Yet even when he overpowered an oddly subdued, passionless Nadal to take a 2-1 lead in sets, all the logic and the smart money insisted the Mallorcan would somehow reignite the flame; and that even if he couldn't, Soderling would do a Devon Loch at the first glimpse of the winning post.
Not a bit of it. When they entered the fourth set tie-break that would clearly decide the match, it was Soderling who stayed ice cool and Nadal, not so pretty in pink, who froze. This was so out of character that you wonder about either a physical ailment or a psychosomatic problem. Who knows, perhaps the added pressure of carrying the world No1 ranking he chased so hard for so long into his favourite tournament weighed him down.
Whatever the explanation, this was not the real Rafa. Instead it was one of those rare and priceless sporting moments that have you yelling at the telly in delirious incredulity. Whether Andy Murray went that far I doubt, so self-possessed has the Scot become, but he must have allowed himself a broad grin of relief because his path to the final has been cleared.
Murray, who must have the most sharply vertical learning curve of any sportsman alive, is improving on clay at startling pace, and was impressive in swatting the giant Croatian Marin Cilic in straight sets yesterday. Whisper it, you patriots, but his first Grand Slam title, and with it the No2 ranking, is within his grasp.
An even more enticing prospect for tennis historians, however, is this. It is now very possible, if not probable, that Federer - humiliated by Nadal in last year's final - will on Sunday equal Pete Sampras's record of 14 major titles, and become the third man in the Open era to complete the "career slam".
But all this speculation can wait a while. For now, it behoves us to salute the adorably modest and gracious Nadal for a period of unparalleled dominance on clay; and to raise the eyebrows in ecstatic bemusement at sport's unending power to make dunces of those who believe in such a mythical beast as the dead cert.
