In the 17 years between 2000 and 2016, six women won the Wimbledon title — and the two winners with the most trophies between them had the same surname. Venus and Serena Williams, Petra Kvitova, Maria Sharapova, Marion Bartoli, and Amelie Mauresmo lifted the Venus Rosewater Dish, with the Williams sisters’ combined 12 titles (and four finals in which they played each other) bringing an atmosphere of inevitability that was occasionally and happily injected with surprise.
Since then, including Serena’s last title in 2016, seven different women have won Wimbledon in seven tournaments, with the 2020 edition having been cancelled due to Covid-19. Williams; Garbine Muguruza; Angelique Kerber; Simona Halep; Ash Barty; Elena Rybakina; and Marketa Vondrousova.
Serena Williams and sister Venus dominated Wimbledon for many years (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
On Saturday July 13, an eighth will follow, when Italy’s Jasmine Paolini, who had never won a tour-level match on grass until last month, takes on Barbora Krejcikova, the Czech whose best result at the All England Club prior to this year was the fourth round. They have come through a draw in which the top seeds have fallen at regular intervals, starting with Belarusian world No 3 Aryna Sabalenka withdrawing with a shoulder injury prior to her first-round match. Vondrousova, also Czech, who won Wimbledon 2023 as an unseeded player, lost in the first round to another unseeded player, Spain’s Jessica Bouzas Maneiro — the first time a defending champion had lost in the first round since 1994, and only the second time in the Open Era.
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Then Iga Swiatek, the Polish world No 1, winner of three consecutive Masters 1000 and Grand Slam tournaments combined, and runaway leader at the top of the WTA rankings, lost to world No 35 Yulia Putintseva of Kazakhstan. No 19 seed Emma Navarro knocked out No 2 and U.S. compatriot Coco Gauff with a similarly flawless performance, when Gauff had looked poised to benefit from three of the top four being either out of the tournament before playing or on the other side of the draw.
Finally, Krejcikova took out Putintseva’s compatriot and world No 4 Rybakina — the last former Wimbledon champion standing — in a comeback win from a set down in their semifinal on Friday. It’s easy to ascribe this kind of randomness, both within the draw and in the last seven years, to some inherent, inchoate unpredictability in women’s tennis. Instead, Wimbledon’s outlier status and the results that the tournament produces are connected to a history of dominance in the 2000s, and the changing influence of its most famous factor: the grass.
The women’s tournament has seen a string of different winners (AELTC/Joe Toth/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
The top four women’s players in the world — Swiatek, Gauff, Sabalenka, and Rybakina — have won the last eight of the last nine majors. Away from Wimbledon, Swiatek has three consecutive French Opens and four in total; Sabalenka has won the last two Australian Opens, and Gauff won the U.S. Open in 2023 after Swiatek won it in 2022. One of Sabalenka, Swiatek and Rybakina have been in the semis of each of the last 13 majors.
At Wimbledon, only Rybakina has reached a final, let alone won a title — Sabalenka has reached two semifinals, in 2021 and 2023, but Gauff and Swiatek’s best results are the fourth round and the quarterfinals respectively. The women’s Wimbledon event has begun to resemble the French Open on the men’s side towards the end of the 1990s and early to mid 2000s, in which three different winners, Albert Costa, Juan Carlos Ferrero and Gaston Gaudio, never won another major in their careers. Martin Verkerk, a Dutch player whose best result at any Grand Slam tournament was otherwise the second round, reached the 2003 final.
Rybakina was the last former champion standing this year (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
During that period, it felt as though whoever could get a grip of the clay for a few matches had a shot at the title, and something similar is happening in the women’s draw at Wimbledon, exacerbated by the shortness of the grass season, the priorities of the best players on the tour and, as always happens in tennis, some in-match variance.
Generally, the winners have not been surface specialists, with only Serena Williams from the last eight editions reaching a subsequent final after lifting the trophy. This being Krejcikova and Paolini’s first and last final would not be a surprise. Of the last seven winners, former world No 1 Ash Barty is the player who looked best set to start dominating the tournament, given the high quality of her devastating slice, but she retired after winning the title aged 25. Wimbledon was always Barty’s dream, she said — winning it the once was perfect.
Ash Barty described winning Wimbledon as the pinnacle of her career (Simon Bruty/Anychance/Getty Images)
Swiatek, the player who has replaced Barty at the top of the women’s game, keeps arriving in south-west London on the back of non-stop tennis after winning the French Open — and often the Masters 1000 clay-court tournaments before it in Rome and Madrid, which now run two weeks each.
Grass is also a surface that few of the top players grow up on. Naomi Osaka, who has won two U.S. and Australian Opens each, has never gone beyond the third round here, not just because she didn’t grow up on it, but because she didn’t play junior events. When she was dominant on hard courts around the turn of the last decade, this was a big equaliser at the third Grand Slam of the year, and players like Halep and Kerber, who weren’t necessarily grass-court specialists, took advantage. The higher variance of three-set tennis also adds to unpredictability, exacerbated by a surface which is already a leveller.
It’s going beyond the surface that reveals the complicated dynamics at the heart of something which looks simple. Of the four semifinalists in this surprise Wimbledon, Rybakina and Krejcikova are Grand Slam winners, Paolini reached the French Open final and Vekic has reached two major quarterfinals.
Swiatek’s loss to Putintseva came less from grass and more from the fact that, after Swiatek won the first set relatively easily, Putintseva reeled off one unforced error in 13 games, peaking and riding her own momentum to overwhelm the world No 1. She might have instituted a Plan B, but that wasn’t really caused by the surface. Her previous Wimbledon defeats came to Elina Svitolina (2023), riding her own wave of crowd support, known giantkiller Alize Cornet (2022) and Ons Jabeur (2021), widely regarded as one of the grass-court specialists on the WTA Tour and a two-time Wimbledon finalist. In last year’s warm-up tournament in Bad Homburg, Germany, she cruised into the semifinals before withdrawing with illness.
Iga Swiatek is figuring out grass, despite her lower winning percentage on the surface compared to her average (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
Add in the wider distribution of major winners on the women’s tour compared to the men’s — and a tournament dynamic with no clear favourite but plenty of previous winners or deep runners — and riders can very quickly emerge. There are “dormant volcanoes” all over the map, as broadcaster Matt Roberts put it on the Tennis Podcast this week. When the women’s draw was made, there were 14 slam winners in the 128, compared to six men — two of whom were Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka, who knew they had zero chance of winning the title.
This year it’s been Krejcikova who’s stepped back into the spotlight. Next year it could be Jelena Ostapenko, or one of the emerging young players like Mirra Andreeva, who herself reached the French Open semifinals before losing in the first round here to up-and-coming Czech Brenda Fruhvirtova.
In some ways, the apparent chaos of Wimbledon coupled with the relative predictability of the other majors is a compelling combination, even if that chaos is a little more ordered than it looks at first glance. It’s at the sharp end of Wimbledon, which by the end of Saturday’s final will have its eighth different winner and twelfth different finalist since 2016, that the outcome is hardest to call.
Roll on the weekend.
(Top photo: Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)
