Follow live coverage of the eighth day of Wimbledon 2024 today
Wimbledon 2024 has its first week in the books, as the round of 16 finishes up business in the men’s and women’s singles draws.
Here, The Athletic looks at the takeaways from the opening seven days in south-west London.
A vindication of surface mastery in tennis?
For two decades, chatter about homogenization has chiselled away at the mastery of the three surfaces of tennis. Grass got slower. Clay got faster. ”Everything plays like a hard court.”
Most of this is true, with the thorniest idiosyncrasies of each surface pruned a little. But grass still remains a separator requiring some combination of affinity, experience and acclimation. Just ask Iga Swiatek.
The women’s world No 1 took a step backwards this year in her quest to one day win the Grand Slam that every player craves, on the only surface on which she is yet to hoist the biggest trophy. Swiatek won the 2024 French Open on the second weekend of June, then opted not to enter a grass-court tournament in the run-up to Wimbledon.
She played one such tournament last year between a win at the French Open and the start of Wimbledon, reaching the semifinals in Bad Homburg, Germany, before withdrawing with illness. At Wimbledon, she then made the quarterfinals,…
