Racket repairs – while you wait
While thousands of fans shuffle around the grounds and soak up Wimbledon’s familiar mood of British unflappability, behind the scenes there is a hive of activity to keep the show on the road. Nowhere more so than at the restringing facility, which processed a record 6,565 rackets at last year’s tournament – an average of nearly 500 per day. “The balls change slightly every year,” says Josh Sillick, on the stall run by the tournament’s official “restringing partner” Babolat. “If they get fluffier more quickly, then the players have to hit them harder, and heat can potentially make a difference too. When a player breaks a string, they can hand it over [to a ball boy or ball girl] and they’ll run over to get it restrung, and they can get it done in 10 or 15 minutes.”
It’s all in the head
As if there were not enough numbers for stats geeks to get their teeth into once the action is under way, the SW19 data supply has a fresh stream of info to ponder this year in the form of “mental” analysis, alongside the familiar figures for first-serve percentages, returns in play (and lots, lots more). And while it is hardly news that some points are far more significant than others – or that the best players win a majority of the biggest points of all – it is still interesting to see the overall tournament averages and the extent to which the top names exceed the mean. Metrics include first (and second) serve points won on break point, how often a player holds serve from 0-15, service points won at 30-30 and deuce, and “decisive” points won both on serve and return. Jannik Sinner’s five-set progress to the second round on Monday may have felt like more of a struggle than many anticipated, but he was well ahead of the tournament average in all the “mental” measurements.
Please queue here
No sporting event embraces the famous British affection for queueing quite like Wimbledon, and having survived The Queue™ in Wimbledon Park, punters face queues to get into the outside courts, queues to see the players practising, and queues for strawberries and Pimms. And there is even queue-related reading material to pass the time while you’re queueing: Ben Chatfield’s Standing In Line: 30 years of obsessive queuing at Wimbledon, a page-turning mix of fan-lit and social history, is a must for every inveterate queuer at £14.99 from the Wimbledon Shop (where the queue for the checkout needs to be seen to be believed).
Heaven scent
An early contender for the most quintessentially “Wimbledon” offering in the shop this year is the trio of scented candles – 100% soya, of course – that will be perfuming middle-class living rooms in Britain and around the world in the months to come. The three scents are gin & tonic, strawberries & cream and fresh cut grass. Light them all at once, close your eyes and take a deep breath – and you’ll be whisked straight back to SW19.
