Learning from Defeat, Federer Reigns As Champion

In 2008, those praises began to be far less frequent. First, it was the loss in the Australian Open semifinals, but that was understandable because Federer had mononucleosis. Then a loss to Rafael Nadal again in the French Open final, but that was acceptable because it was Nadal on clay.

Then came the loss to Nadal at Wimbledon, and when Federer fell to his rival after a classic match, so did his status. He had failed. The voices once full of praise and admiration were now full of doubt. Is he still the best? Will he ever win another major? These same questions were unthinkable just a year ago.

The perfect athlete who would never fail was now human. Age and fatigue were now realistic concerns. The rest of the field was getting better and perhaps; his time was passing.

These were thoughts not only in the minds of spectators but undoubtedly in the mind of Federer himself. He saw Nadal, Novak Djokovic and the rest of the field, and he saw a much younger, much quicker group of athletes. While others were succeeding, he was failing, and he and everyone else in the world knew it.

While failure is something that all humans share, it is how we react to failure that makes us different. After we have failed, there are two options. We can let it bring us down and continue to fail, or we can understand why he failed, learn from it and do our best to make sure it does not happen again. 

Federer is no different than anyone else because he too faced that choice. He could have settled on the idea that he was no longer capable of great things. He could have believed that there were players better than him. He could have been content just being able to reach a grand slam final, as many other would have been.

He was not, however. He remembered those failures and used them to fuel success because as we have seen so often in life our greatest successes can come as a result of our worst failures.

When he won the final point of the U.S. Open over Andy Murray, it was a different feeling than Federer was used to. Not because he had won, but because now he had something to contrast it against.

As he celebrated his fifth straight U.S. Open title, he was again, in the eyes of the public, revered. Not because he was once again the man who did not fail but because he was the man who failed and learned from it.

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