YESTERDAY was the cue for Rafael Nadal to impose his presence on the French Open. Please note that I pick my words with some care: few players have such an imposing physical presence on the court, and fewer still have been at such pains to project it.

He strode on to court in a special costume. You would not think that it would work: such an elaborate personal superstructure generally hints at compensation for inferior performance. Not with Nadal: the fancy dress is all part of the package of intimidation. It is an extension of himself.

He wears calf-length shorts, or rather a pair of does-my-bum-look-hard-in-these trousers. Above that, the muscles-vest, a shirt cut back to the shoulders to give the best possible view of those impossibly pneumatic biceps. Me, I’d have thought that the brisk Parisian evening was a mite chilly for biceps-revelation, but then I don’t have sponsors to please or opponents to displease.

This is all topped off with the headband, and the combat- bedraggled hair. It’s all pure Rambo. That’s the obvious inspiration here: Sylvester Stallone on the rampage, looking for justice and not caring who gets in his way. The whole package reeks of the slogan from — to switch films on you — the original Dirty Harry movie.

With Nadal, you don’t assign him to a tennis match, you just turn him loose. He reminds me, more than anyone else, of Venus Williams: the same desire to use any means at hand to make an opponent feel small, unable to compete in terms of power. Show off that mighty bod, go on and win the warm-up. Hell, your opponent’s a break down before the start. That’s how Nadal played it against Robin Soderling, of Sweden, yesterday. First impose yourself and then go crashing and banging into his weaknesses to win 6-2, 7-5, 6-1.

Nadal makes tennis a thing of physical splendour. As opposed to Roger Federer, who makes tennis a thing of metaphysical splendour. And that, I suspect, is at the heart of the way in which Nadal has Federer rattled. Nadal gives the impression of a game based entirely on untamed power. There’s a good deal more to it than that, most notably remarkable accuracy and a wonderful feeling for the rhythm of a rally.

But it all comes in this package of unambiguous maleness. The man is an in-your-face testosterone overdose, and the performance seems designed to make Federer feel a bit of a wimp. Federer can do the most marvellous things with a tennis ball, but he can’t do that wanna-feel-my-pecs strut. Such small matters can get to a chap. Nadal turns 20 on Saturday, and is seeded to meet Federer in the final here. He now holds a 5-1 lead over Federer, after beating him in Rome 16 days ago in five sets, saving two match points as he did so.

Federer, peevish afterwards, complained that Nadal’s uncle had been coaching his boy on court. Maybe it was true, but it was the fact that it bothered a champion that was significant.

This is shaping up to be a fair old rivalry, and rivalries are the stuff of sport. The rivalries, I mean, in which each player finds in the other a kind of completion and reaches the best of himself through the other’s excellence. That is what happened with Björn Borg and John McEnroe. There are increasing indications that the same thing is happening here.

Nadal’s hand was strengthened still further by his breaking of a singular record yesterday. This was his 54th consecutive victory in clay-court matches and it beats the record of Guillermo Vilas, who was there yesterday. Vilas handed over a trophy to Nadal to mark the occasion but did not feel called on to overdo the moral generosity, still less the humility.

“First of all, Nadal’s record is spanning over two years, and that is not the same,” he said. Vilas’s record of 53 wins was set between May and September of 1977. “Then I have the feeling that he had easy tournaments on his schedule for that purpose.” Vilas pointed out that he had records of 46 consecutive victories on all surfaces, and of 14 tournaments in a calendar year. Beat that, kid. Vilas added: “They never gave me any trophy.”

As Vilas so astutely notices, times change and, barring the occasional match point to save against one of the greatest players that ever drew breath, Nadal is the undisputed master of the red dirt in the 21st century.

He is also pretty seriously excellent on hard courts and will be turned loose on England for the grass-court season, playing at Queen’s Club before Wimbledon. Last year when he hit the grass he looked as happy as a wet cat. This year, older, wiser, stronger and more packed than ever with self-belief, he will be ready to rumble.

But first the little matter of Parisian clay, and if all goes well, the next great episode in the budding rivalry. A sporting legend is taking shape before our eyes.