Italian translation at settesei.it
Buried under the din of the Serena-Ramos story is a remarkable fact about parity in women’s tennis right now. Naomi Osaka was the eighth different grand slam champion in eight events, a streak dating back to Serena Williams’s victory at last year’s Australian Open. Since then, it’s been a different face with every trophy: Jelena Ostapenko, Garbine Muguruza, Sloane Stephens, Caroline Wozniacki, Simona Halep, Angelique Kerber, and Osaka. In the same time span, only three different men have won majors.
The women’s field is so deep that the streak could easily keep going. I built a possible Australian Open draw using the current top 128 players in the WTA rankings, then ran a forecast of the tournament based on each player’s current Elo rating. Here are the title chances for each of the last eight slam winners:
Player Seed Title Odds Simona Halep 1 16.7% Caroline Wozniacki 2 7.1% Angelique Kerber 3 5.7% Serena Williams 16 5.5% Naomi Osaka 7 4.9% Sloane Stephens 9 2.6% Garbine Muguruza 14 1.8% Jelena Ostapenko 10 0.5% TOTAL 44.9%
Altogether, they add up to less than 50%! Put another way, there are better than even odds that we get a ninth different woman giving a victory speech in Melbourne. Here are the players with the best chances:
Player Seed Title Odds Elina Svitolina 6 8.8% Aryna Sabalenka 20 6.6% Petra Kvitova 5 5.9% Karolina Pliskova 8 3.7% Ashleigh Barty 17 3.5% Caroline Garcia 4 3.3% Madison Keys 18 2.6% Venus Williams 21 2.6% Mihaela Buzarnescu 23 2.3% Julia Goerges 11 2.2%
Ok, yes, Mihaela Buzarnescu seems a little out of place here. But of the other nine players, would any of them represent more of a surprise than Ostapenko, Stephens, or Osaka? By the numbers, three of the top five favorites for the Australian Open haven’t won a major in the last two years.
Given the sheer number of plausible contenders, it’s easy to imagine not just nine different slam winners in a row, but twelve, extending through the entire 2019 season. Consider the possibilities:
- Australia: Karolina Pliskova (or former champion Victoria Azarenka, or maybe 2018 semi-finalist Elise Mertens)
- Roland Garros: Elina Svitolina (or home favorite Caroline Garcia, or a breakthrough from Daria Kasatkina)
- Wimbledon: Petra Kvitova (or Ashleigh Barty, or Julia Goerges)
- US Open: Aryna Sabalenka (or Madison Keys, or former champion Maria Sharapova)
This is all rather fanciful, I know. But it’s barely even accurate to say there is a “favorite” when only one woman has a double-digit chance of winning the next major, and her odds are a mere one in six. No single player is likely to win any given grand slam, and only Halep has better than a fifty-fifty shot at winning one over the course of the year.
The chances that the streak extends to twelve are small, but not as low as, say, Osaka’s probability of winning the US Open before the tournament began. We’ve seen that the odds of a ninth different winner triumphing in Australia are about 55%. If that person wins, she’ll probably have earned a rosy forecast for Paris, so the probability of a new winner at the French is lower. And so on, after a tenth or eleventh different champion. If we lower the “new-winner” odds by seven percentage points for each slam, the chances of twelve-slam streak are 3.7%, the same as Pliskova’s probability of becoming number nine. Stranger things have happened. In women’s tennis, the unpredictable has become the norm.