An athlete dies twice, but can only choose one of them: the last days of Roger Federer’s career were made into a documentary

Roger Federer is nervous among his family and team, hours away from releasing the video that ends his 24-year tennis career at the highest level. 41 years, 20 Grand Slam titles, the announcement took place in 2022. Then came the interviews, the photographs, the newspaper headlines. Broadcast times, review of the best moments on platforms like YouTube. The books. The feeling of emptiness. First, the fans: there is no time to shed tears. A letter read with his voice always on the verge of shaking, saying goodbye to his tennis family, thanking his parents and his wife, Mirka. It is not normal to see the Swiss man in casual clothes and sighing, without a white ribbon on his head and a winner elegant about to get out of his racket. Nor see this athlete as a businessman, who has a team behind him, worried about how he is doing and what steps he will take. We are used to seeing him, from Wimbledon to the Australian Open, on a tennis court with an almost unbreakable spirit. But his knees and successive surgeries forced him to stop. He played his last game on the ATP circuit in 2021. “Roger Federer — Twelve Last Days†, a documentary available on Prime Video, works as an intimate tribute to his legacy through the days leading up to the Cup Laver, an event in London that he helped found and in which he played alongside his eternal rival, Rafael Nadal, with whom he began sharing courts em 2008.