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I am always surprised when people come up to me wearing a T-shirt that says, “Shut up legs!” It was just something I said once, long ago, to a journalist who’d asked how I could dig so deep in races. But even today people who see me say, “Come on, Jens. Tell us! You know what we want to hear!”

“Shut up legs,” I say, and they love it. They laugh. They tell me it inspires them.

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On the Shakespeare Scale for evaluating athletic performances in terms of their tragic flaws, in other words, Federer rated a full Hamlet. He was indecisive. He was slow to act. He looked like he’d rather be in a grove somewhere getting depressed about epistemology than knifing the motherfucker who X’d his dad.4 And that was genuinely shocking, because … my god, that was Roger Federer. No athlete from my lifetime has been a more natural combination of instinct and intelligence and talent and proficiency and will.