A look back: Rafael Nadal’s 1st, 100th, 200th, 300th and 400th Masters 1000 wins
He got his first Masters 1000 win as a 16-year-old in Monte Carlo, and now his 400th as a 35-year-old at Indian Wells.
From Monte Carlo to Shanghai and now Indian Wells, Rafael Nadal has hit his biggest Masters 1000 match-win milestones all over the globe—and today, as he becomes the first man to reach 400 career Masters 1000 wins, we take a look back at all of them.
It didn’t take long for Nadal to get his first Masters 1000 win. As a 16-year-old, No. 109-ranked qualifier playing in the first Masters 1000 event of his career (and just his second tour-level event), he blew past former No. 6 Karol Kucera, 6-1, 6-2, in the first round of Monte Carlo in 2003. The match lasted just 63 minutes.
And he didn’t stop there.
In the second round he played a current Top 10 player for the first time and won, beating No. 7-ranked Albert Costa—the reigning Roland Garros champion—7-5, 6-3.
He ended up falling to Guillermo Coria in the third round, 7-6 (3), 6-2.
Tomas Berdych had been a thorn in Nadal’s side early on in his career, winning three of the pair’s first four meetings, but by 2008 the Spaniard had evened their head-to-head up, 3-3, and he took a 4-3 lead with a 7-6 (6), 6-2 victory in the semifinals of Miami that year, which was also the 100th Masters 1000 victory of his career.
Nadal would actually win 19 of his last 20 meetings with Berdych, extending that head-to-head lead to 20-4 before the Czech eventually retired in 2019.
The toughest of all of these milestone wins was Nadal’s 6-4, 2-6, 6-1 victory over Andy Murray in the semifinals of Monte Carlo in 2011, a match that lasted two hours and 59 minutes and saw 13 breaks of serve in 25 games—six for Murray, seven for Nadal.
“He has unbelievable potential. He’s very good in all the surfaces,” Nadal said of Murray after. “There’s no reason why he cannot play very well on clay because his serve is good, his movements are very good, and his shots are with topspin.”
Murray would eventually beat Nadal twice on clay, both of those wins coming in Madrid, in 2015 and 2016. He also made the final of Roland Garros in 2016.
Nadal looked like a man on a mission going into his quarterfinal clash against Stan Wawrinka at Shanghai in 2015—having lost their last two meetings, in the final of the Australian Open in 2014 and in the quarterfinals of Rome earlier that year, the Spaniard went into overdrive from 2-all in the first set, barreling through nine games in a row to build a 6-2, 5-0 lead and closing it out a few games later, 6-2, 6-1.
The match lasted just 64 minutes.
Nadal had to battle hard to make it past American Sebastian Korda in the second round of Indian Wells two days ago, rallying from a 5-2, double-break deficit in the third set to prevail, 6-2, 1-6, 7-6 (3), and Dan Evans took it to him early on in their third-round match, too, breaking early and building a 4-2 lead in the first set.
But like he’s done so many times in the past—for the last 19 years, really—Nadal never stopped fighting, clawing back to take the first set and then breaking early in the second en route to a 7-5, 6-3 victory over the talented Brit.
And with that one-hour, 42-minute victory, he became the first man to record 400 career wins at Masters 1000 events since that level of tournament began in 1990.
MOST CAREER WINS AT MASTERS 1000 EVENTS:
400: Rafael Nadal
381: Roger Federer
374: Novak Djokovic
219: Andy Murray
209: Andre Agassi
191: Tomas Berdych
190: Pete Sampras
189: David Ferrer
157: Andy Roddick
155: Stan Wawrinka