By Louisa Thomas
When Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal walked onto Centre Court at Wimbledon on Friday, the sight was at once familiar and strange—strange, in part, for seeming so familiar. The two men were meeting for the fortieth time, the fourteenth at a major. They had met only five weeks before, in the semifinals of the French Open. Nadal had runWimbledon, where Federer has won eight titles to Nadal’s two. The last time they had faced each other there was in 2008, in what many consider the greatest match ever played. Federer was twenty-six then, and Nadal twenty-two; now they are thirty-seven and thirty-three, respectively. They were seeded two and three in this tournament,Novak Djokovic, rather than one and two, as they had been then. They have less hair than they used to. In 2008, the match had seemed to represent a passing of the torch or a changing of the guard—pick your favorite cliché. Except the torch wasn’t passed, and the guard didn’t change: instead, what we
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