Tag Archives: rain

Rain is a statistical
near-inevitability. The only no-rain tournaments since 1922 have been 1931,
1976, 1993 and 1995.

Spencer Gore became the first Wimbledon champion in 1877, he said he doubted whether the game would catch on.

In 1877 there were 22 competitors – it cost just one shilling to watch the final and Gore received 12 guineas for his triumph.

In 2001 the men’s singles final was contested on a Monday for only the third time in Wimbledon’s long history. The other two ‘People’s Monday’ occurred in 1919 and 1922.

The famous Wimbledon turf is a mixture of 70% perennial rye grass and 30% Barcrown creeping red fescue. It is cut to a height of exactly eight millimetres.

In WW2 a bomb was dropped on Centre Court and 1,200 seats were lost.

A wooden racket was last used at Wimbledon in 1987.

One ball is only in play for about 20 minutes of an average two-and-a-half-hour tennis match.

40 miles worth of string are fitted to 2,000 rackets over the fortnight – just under six laps of centre court

Only eight left-handed players, six men and two women, have ever won a Wimbledon singles title

Court No. 2 is known as the Graveyard, as it’s infamously the place where seeded players get knocked out.

In 1882 the croquet was dropped and Wimbledon was used exclusively for tennis

Ball boys were originally provided by Shaftesbury Homes -a charity for homeless children. These days, the 300 boys and girls are pupils from local schools.

In 13 days, catering staff serve 300,000 cups of tea and coffee, 250,000 bottles of water, 190,000 sandwiches, 177,000 main meals, 150,000 glasses of Pimm’s, 135,000 ice creams, 30,000 portions of fish and chips, 112,000 punnets of strawberries, 23,000 bananas, 17,000 bottles of champagne, 12,000 kilos of salmon and 7,000 litres of cream

Up to 52,000 tennis balls will be used during the tournament, each one hand-tested for weight, bounce and compression and stored at exactly 68F.

More than 6,000 people staff the championships

Underneath the new Centre Court roof 143,000 tonnes of conditioned air is pumped around every second into the venue, which is big enough to hold 290 million tennis balls.