“It’s obvious if it’s not Roland Garros, I will probably not take the risks of playing the first two days,” he said. “But it’s the most important event of the year for me, so we tried our best. We take risks yesterday. That’s why we played with anesthetic injection, so without feeling at all in the wrist. But you know when I am coming to Roland Garros, I am coming thinking about winning the tournament. To win the tournament, I need five more matches, and the doctor says that’s 100 percent impossible.”

Nadal’s withdrawal allowed his would-be opponent Marcel Granollers a walkover into the fourth round, and could make the road to the title considerably less arduous for No. 1 seed Novak Djokovic, who has yet to win the French Open and could have faced Nadal in the semifinals.

Nadal’s career has often been interrupted by injuries, above all by knee tendinitis. He also withdrew from the 2014 United States Open with a right wrist injury, which affected the left-handed-playing Nadal’s two-handed backhand. But Nadal said the injury to his left wrist was a new one. He said the trouble began in a quarterfinal victory May 6 against João Sousa during the Masters 1000 tournament in Madrid.

Nadal lost in the semifinals of that tournament to Andy Murray and said he used mesotherapy before that match to deaden the pain. He traveled to Barcelona the next day for medical tests and decided to play in the Masters 1000 event in Rome.

“The doctor told me that there is nothing really bad,” he said. “So I accept that, and I wanted to go to Rome and I went to Rome. I played only with anti-inflammatories.”