This sicknote Wimbledon continued on Wednesday with the withdrawal of Alex de Minaur from what he described as “the biggest match” of his career against Novak Djokovic.
De Minaur – who had torn hip cartilage on the final point of his previous win – became the 11th singles player to pull out before a match at this tournament, thus extending a sequence that had also included British legend Andy Murray on the first Tuesday.
Add in the eight players who have failed to complete their matches, and the result is Wimbledon’s highest tally of withdrawals and retirements since the start of the Open era.
“It has sometimes felt like a battle for survival,” said Pam Shriver, the former Wimbledon semi-finalist who has coached Croatia’s Donna Vekic to the same stage of this year’s tournament.
“It’s not the All England Club’s fault, with the appalling weather of the past 10 days, but we’ve been dealing with heavier balls, more time sitting indoors, and a lot of stress for everyone. I’ve seen a few players slipping and falling under the show-court roofs, but it’s not easy for the less famous names on the outside courts either, with all the stopping and starting.”
Notable as they are, our statistics do not even tell the whole story, because several high-profile matches – including Taylor Fritz’s quarter-final against Lorenzo Musetti – have finished in regular defeats for an incapacitated player.
Jannik Sinner suffered from dizziness on Tuesday, while Danielle Collins pulled something at the back of her leg on Monday, and Alexander Zverev limped out of the tournament the same day.
Emma Raducanu might not have been injured, exactly, but her loss to Lulu Sun on Sunday featured a fall and an 11-minute medical delay which drained her momentum at exactly the wrong time. Then, when Sun came up against Vekic in the quarter-finals, she was so exhausted that she began cramping late in the second set.
If we pan out to include players who suffered from jaded minds rather than bodies, this category included world No 1 Iga Swiatek, who told reporters after her third-round defeat that “My tank of really pushing myself to the limits became suddenly, like, empty.”
It was a slightly different story for defending champion Marketa Vondrousova, who admitted after her first-round defeat that she had felt hugely nervous about opening the schedule on Centre Court. But we should also note that Vondrousova had fallen heavily in Berlin a couple of weeks ago. “I was a bit scared because of my leg, too,” she acknowledged.
Admittedly, such scenes are not unprecedented. In 2013, so-called “Wacky Wednesday” saw a record tally of seven retirements and withdrawals on its own, plus defeats for seven former world No 1s including defending champion Roger Federer.
There have also been periods – notably in 2017 and 2018 – when all the top men seemed to be injured at once, prompting Rafael Nadal to comment during the 2018 Australian Open that “they [the ATP] have to think a little bit about the health of the players.”
But there is increasingly a sense that an already arduous sport is reaching a tipping point.
The build-up to this year’s Wimbledon was dominated by health chat, whether it revolved around Djokovic’s miraculous recovery from knee-meniscus surgery or Murray’s spinal cyst.
When Telegraph Sport offered our pre-tournament favourites, we had to caveat three of the leading women on the basis that Vondrousova’s hip was an unknown, Elena Rybakina has withdrawn from several events this season because of sickness, and Aryna Sabalenka arrived carrying a “rare” problem in a shoulder muscle that didn’t allow her to serve.
As things turned out, Rybakina shrugged off her health problems and stormed through to the semi-finals on Wednesday. But Sabalenka never even took to the match court. From day one, Wimbledon 2024 has felt like a demolition derby in which the prize could well go to the last player standing.
This tournament underscores one great misconception about Wimbledon. It looks so easy on TV, two athletic young things swishing a racket around on a lovely striped lawn. Yet anyone who has seen top-level tennis up close knows how physically intense it is.
What with improved racket technology and the ultra-professionalism of the leading names – who now tend to hire fitness trainers and physios as well as coaches – there are no easy matches any more. As a consequence, Wimbledon 2024 has delivered a record 36 five-setters to date, beating the 35 (also a new record) played at January’s Australian Open.
Throw in the recent expansion of Masters 1000 events to 14 days rather than seven or 10, and we are talking about a seriously exhausted workforce. Yes, the sport has been discussing a possible rejig of the calendar – the so-called Premium Tour – to reduce players’ commitments and create a longer off-season. But such is tennis’s administrative inertia that it is hard to see anything happening in the short term.
Improved medical techniques helped the so-called “Big Four” – and Serena Williams – to play into their late thirties or beyond. But will the next generation of champions – the likes of Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz – be able to drag as much mileage out of their weary bodies?
The Telegraph
