Palas de madera, pistas de muro

On 26 December 2024, Carolina Navarro announced on her social channels that the coming season would be her last as a professional. EFE carried it from Málaga, and one line in it does the work of a short history of the sport: "He podido vivirlo desde sus inicios, con palas de madera y pistas de muro." She had known it from the start, wooden palas and walled courts, and had stayed long enough to see it played "en estadios hasta como el de Roland Garros", in stadiums as grand as Roland Garros.

What follows is drawn from the public record and her own published words, with dates. The Alborán has not spoken to her. Where the record runs thin, the piece says so.

The record opens in Málaga, on 26 February 1976. Her own website supplies the family: a father from Málaga, a mother from Sweden. She played tennis from seven and gave it up, she told El Español in September 2025, when she had to choose between training and her studies. Padel came next, locally, with her sisters, until "me llamó la que era número uno de España, María Silvela, para jugar con ella e irme a Madrid." Spain's number one wanted her as a partner, in Madrid. A scholarship to study sport science followed.

The best document from mid-career is a profile in En Sueco, a Swedish-language paper, dated 31 August 2009. It reported that at La Reserva del Higuerón she and Alejandra Salazar had won the Padel Pro Tour event 6-3, 6-3 against Cata Tenorio and Valeria Pavón, their fourth tour title in a row.

She gave the paper the arithmetic. The women's prize fund at a tour event was €14,000 in total, shared among the pairs who reached the quarter-finals, and a title was worth €1,500 to her. She paid her own coach, her own psychologist and her own fitness trainer, and lived on sponsors rather than winnings, which was why, she said, so few women could make a living at it.

"Necesitamos más visibilidad, porque eso incide en los patrocinadores," she told El Español in 2025: more visibility, because that is what brings the sponsors. Perhaps the top fifteen could live from it, she reckoned, with good sponsors.

The number of years she spent ranked first appears in almost everything written about her, her own website included. We could not find it set out year by year in any record we could check, so it is left out here. Contemporary reports place her at number one in 2009 with Salazar. Her own site records a spell at the top with the Argentine Cecilia Reiter, her partner for more than a decade.

The same site lists the world titles by year. She was world pairs champion in 2000, 2006 and 2012, and won the team championship with Spain in 1998, 2000, 2010 and 2014. Asked by El Español for her best and hardest moments, she gave one answer: "Ganar el Mundial en 2006 en Murcia cuando venía de dos roturas de ligamentos importantes. También fue el peor, precisamente por esas lesiones." Murcia, after two serious ligament ruptures, was the best of it, and because of the ruptures, the worst.

Sweden runs through all of it. En Sueco reported in 2009 that she had been at the opening of a court in Båstad, and that SVT had since brought her back to demonstrate the game on the news. In August 2022 she announced that she would play for Sweden, her mother's country: "Un país que me vio crecer, donde año tras año he viajado para estar con los míos." The country that watched her grow up, where she had gone year after year to be with her own people. The 2014 world championship, she noted, had been her last with Spain and Sweden's first. Sweden qualified at Derby that autumn and reached the quarter-finals of the world championship in Dubai, where Argentina beat them 3-0.

In 2012 her sister Elsa and a fellow coach, after a course in teaching adapted padel, set up a small school in Málaga for players with disabilities. It became an association, Palas para Todos, based at the Real Club Mediterráneo de Málaga, with Navarro as president. "Comenzamos con cuatro chavales y ahora tenemos alrededor de 80," she told El Español: four youngsters at the start, around 80 now.

On 17 July 2025, at the Palacio de Deportes José María Martín Carpena, she and Melania Merino lost 7-5, 6-4 to Cata Nogueira and Martina Fassio in the round of 16 of the Málaga Premier Padel P1. It was her last match in Málaga. The tournament's own report said she had said goodbye to "su" Martín Carpena.

The last tournament was the Premier Padel Major in Acapulco, at the Arena GNP Seguros, from 22 to 30 November. Navarro and Merino won their opening match 6-2, 6-2, beat Virginia Riera and Ana Catarina Nogueira 7-5, 6-1, and lost in the round of 16 to Marina Guinart and Verónica Virseda, 6-2, 6-2. She was 49.

Padel's first court was built in Acapulco, at Enrique Corcuera's house, in 1969. Nothing we found connects the arena to that house, and she is not on record saying anything about the city as a place to stop.

Two months earlier she had put the decision plainly. "Voy a cumplir 50 años y ya es edad para pasar al otro lado," she told El Español: she would soon be 50, the age to cross to the other side. In May 2026 the Spanish federation named her seleccionadora of the women's national team, succeeding Icíar Montes. In September, in Buenos Aires, a Spanish women's team under her won the FIP Senior World Cup, a competition for players over 40.

On 24 September, in Madrid, she named the eight women selected to play for Spain at the FIP World Cup in Doha, which opens on 2 November.