Nadal's perfect record under threat in Paris

A blistered foot and aching muscles will do nothing to quell Rafael Nadal's yearning to preserve his 100 per cent record at the French Open.

Just when it seemed that the Spanish juggernaut may be slowing down on his favourite surface, thanks to a hectic schedule, Nadal re-affirmed his king of clay status by lifting the Hamburg Masters title last weekend.

He picked up the only Masters event on clay to have eluded him with back-to-back victories over the sport's other heavyweights, Australian Open champion Novak Djokovic and world number one Roger Federer, thus gaining the psychological advantage before action begins at Roland Garros today.

The win allowed him to switch his focus from his complaints about this season's crammed claycourt calendar, in which three Masters tournaments were squeezed into four weeks, to the defence of his Paris crown.

While Nadal will be aiming to extend his own record and become the first man to win four French Open trophies in four visits to Paris, he knows that his supremacy is under serious threat this year.

For the first time, there is more than one bona fide rival lurking close by and ready to wrest his crown away. After 11 successive majors in which the winner's trophy either had Nadal or Federer's name engraved on it, Djokovic muscled in on the act in January to lift the Norman Brookes Cup in Melbourne.

The Serb, 21, may be ranked third in the world behind Federer and Nadal but he is the number one in what the ATP calls the Race, which measures only performances since the start of the season.

Federer, surprisingly, is a distant third on the Race list and as the season approaches the halfway mark, his 2008 trophy cupboard is looking unexpectedly bare. Hence he will arrive in Paris in the unfamiliar role of being an outsider.

As for the other 125 players making up the field, getting their hands on the trophy is likely to remain a distant dream.

Meanwhile, Justine Henin's decision to call it quits at 25 earlier this month has not so much left a hole at the top of the French Open draw as a gaping chasm which new world number one Maria Sharapova will be aching to fill.

Henin has won four of the last five grand slams at Roland Garros and her shock retirement has left the field as open as if Roger Federer hung up his strings a fortnight before Wimbledon. For, unless Serena Williams produces the kind of cavalier run that saw her emerge from the depths of the draw at the Australian Open last year, there will be a new champion's name inscribed on the Coupe Suzanne Lenglen on June 7.

With Henin gone, Williams, victor over sister Venus in the 2002 final, is the only former champion in the 128-strong field, and form and history point elsewhere for the successor to the diminutive Belgian's crown.

The closest Sharapova has come to winning on the red dust in Paris was last year, but a crushing 6-2 6-1 loss to Ana Ivanovic in the semis suggested she may never win a slam away from the faster courts of Flushing Meadows and Wimbledon.