Why Wimbledon is an outlier in the current women’s game | Tennis News

Mumbai: From the 2023 season in Grand Slams played on hard and clay courts, the women’s singles champion has had a familiar ring to it. With the exception of Madison Keys in this year’s season-opening Slam, the Australian Open, French Open and US Open have been won by either Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Swiatek or Coco Gauff.

You’d have to be an extremely dedicated tennis follower to recall the two Wimbledon champions of the period. Difficult, right? So here they go — Barbora Krejcikova and Marketa Vondrousova.

In this rather steady phase of the women’s game where three of its most prominent stars have dominated the majors, Wimbledon is an outlier. And it has been so for nearly a decade now.

Since 2016 when Serena Williams won the last of her seven titles on the greens of the All England Club, Wimbledon has not seen a two-time champion from the women’s draw. It’s the only Slam with this trend. The Australian Open has had two-time winners in Naomi Osaka and Sabalenka through the same period, French Open has had a four-time champion Swiatek, while Osaka is also a twice US Open champion.

The Rosewater Dish has changed hands from Garbine Muguruza (2017) to Angelique Kerber (2018), Simona Halep (2019), Ash Barty (2021), Elena Rybakina (2022), Vondrousova (2023) to Krejcikova, the defending champion of the tournament starting Monday.

None of these women have managed to go all the way again at the Big W. Only one woman in this decade so far has managed to add another grass-court title to the Wimbledon triumph, and it needed an epic Vondrousova comeback to bag another trophy in Berlin on Sunday after two years of struggle since her Wimbledon wonder run.

Grass and its most revered major, evidently, is not the current women stars’ cup of tea, at least thus far.

It wasn’t always the case. The women’s game did have the top faces acing even the grass test (between 2000 and 2016, Serena and her sister Venus Williams captured 12 titles among them). It also had its share of grass-court specialists (think Petra Kvitova, the left-handed Czech who won Wimbledon in 2011 and 2014 but did not advance beyond the semi-finals in any other Slam).

Over the past decade, those specialists have increasingly faded. Barty, the former world No.1 from Australia flaunting a chopping and slicing game, was perhaps among the most recent and well-known of those.

The two world No.1s to follow her have yet to completely find their feet on grass. Sabalenka, top-ranked currently, has made two semi-finals at Wimbledon but Swiatek, who had a blazing and unrivalled reign at the top from 2023 to 2024, only has one quarter-final appearance to show.

The commonality in both their games, which also applies to Gauff, is their baseline-heavy approach. It works on the truer hard courts and slower clay courts but not quite on the quicker and more inconsistent nature of grass. Sabalenka bludgeons groundstrokes from the back of the court, Gauff relies more on defence than offence to win points, while Swiatek is at her best ripping those topspin-laden forehands.

“(Swiatek’s) Forehand is good enough, even though it doesn’t pay off as much on the grass as it does on clay,” Martina Navratilova, a nine-time champion at Wimbledon who won a record 120 matches on those iconic courts, told WTA.

That statement could as well apply to the games and weapons of any of the three. It’s little surprise, therefore, that none of them feature in the top five list of WTA’s Grass Index, which calculates grass-court performances over the previous five seasons.

Topping that chart is Krejcikova (2,304 points), the defending singles champion who also has seven doubles Slam titles. Possessing a doubles game and feeling at home at the net comes in handy on grass. Below her are Vondrousova, Ons Jabeur — the crafty Tunisian with a penchant for the drop shot made the Wimbledon final in 2022 and 2023 and has the most match wins on grass since 2021 — Donna Vekic and Rybakina.

Eighth in this grass order with 1,240 points, Sabalenka is the best among the current multiple-Slam winning trio. Wimbledon is the big missing link in the individual and collective CVs of the current women’s games most recognisable stars. Wimbledon is also missing a repeat champion in nearly a decade. Will 2025 break that trend?