The Manacor town hall already has the go-ahead for Rafael Nadal to start the project tribute to the tennis playerwhich will consist of placing a sculpture dedicated to the athlete in front of the family home Located in the Plaza del Palau, in the downtown area of his hometown. The only condition that Nadal has made known to the City Council is that he wants it to be a figure that resembles him, therefore, he prefers to control that his face is as realistic and faithful to reality as possible. And it is worth remembering that there have been controversies with other sports due to the lack of resemblance to reality, such as the case of Cristiano Ronaldo at the Madeira airport.
Last Friday March 3 Mayor Miquel Oliver and Nadal held a meeting at the academy that Rafa has in the Torre dels Enagistes sports complex, to discuss the subject in depth and for the former number one in world tennis to give his approval to the two figures who will compose a dialogue between the Nadal of the past and the present. “Rafel valued the virtual recreation very positively and gave us his approval to continue forward. It was a very cordial and lively meeting in which we discussed many other issues”, explained the mayor Oliver (Més-Esquerra) with whom Nadal has had his ideological and political differences in recent years. An exchange of opinions that ended with Nadal’s request to be able to control how his face and his appearance will look so that reality is not distorted. “He has not asked us who he wants the sculptor to be or what material the sculpture has to be made of. Quite the contrary, he prefers that it not be an excessive public expense and that, if possible, the artist be Mallorcan”, recalls Oliver, who agrees with the tennis player that the sculpture should be a point of attraction for both tourism and motivation for those who see it.
two figures
It will be a group formed by two figures, who will maintain a kind of intergenerational dialogue between them. One will be that of the current Rafel Nadal, sitting next to an olive tree in the Plaza del Palau, dressed as a tennis player along with his towels, bottles and racket, as if it were a break between one set and another of the match; while the other will also represent Nadal, but with eight or ten years, in his beginnings and dreaming of what he has become: one of the world’s biggest men’s tennis stars.
Right now Manacor town hall is considering the proposals of up to four international sculptors, one of them Mallorcan, in order to know the style and materials that each one would use, as well as the budget of each project, for which a surplus will be used through the administrative figure of contracting and intervention for artistic exclusivity , in order to speed up deadlines as much as possible. It is known that the sculptures will be made of metal, almost certainly in bronze, and that they will be somewhat larger than life, with an increase in scale up to 110% of reality.