Italian translation at settesei.it
Earlier this week, I trotted out some stats showing that the Wimbledon grass is playing slower this year, the latest tick in a years-long trend. Many fans suspect that by the second week, the conditions are even slower still, with huge brown spots around each baseline where the players have worn away the grass. Assuming that the dying-grass effect is similar each year, this is something we can test.
I ran my surface speed algorithm for several subsets of Wimbledon men’s singles matches: week 1, week 2, each round from 1 to 4, and the final 8. For a single year, the “week 2,” “round 4,” and “final 8” samples are too small to give us any reliable indicators. But over the course of two decades, the differences between weeks and rounds–the effect we’re interested in today–should become clear.
(Quick refresher on my surface speed method: It uses ace rate as a proxy for speed–not perfect, but functional, using a stat that is universally available–and takes into account the server and returner in each match. An average court speed is 1.0, and ratings typically range from about 0.5 for a venue like Monte Carlo to 1.5 for the fastest grass and indoor hard courts.)
For example, here are the week-by-week and round-by-round speed ratings for the 2018 Wimbledon men’s draw:
- Week 1: 1.16
- Week 2: 1.16
- Round 1: 1.02
- Round 2: 1.29
- Round 3: 1.33
- Round 4: 1.25
- Last 8: 1.08
I promised noise, and there it is. Each week is equally speedy, but the first round and last few rounds are oddly slower than the rest. I don’t have a good explanation for the first round (and there might not be one–it could be random), but the last 8 often features fewer aces, even when adjusting for the players involved. We’ll come back to that in a bit.
Wimbledon, 2000-18
Here are the same numbers, averaged over the last 19 Wimbledons:
- Week 1: 1.20
- Week 2: 1.21
- Round 1: 1.19
- Round 2: 1.20
- Round 3: 1.21
- Round 4: 1.25
- Last 8: 1.16
The sample of the last 8 still deviates from the rest, but with more data, the difference is much smaller. The gap between 1.20 and 1.16 is just an ace or two per match. That’s not enough to reverse the outcome of any but the very closest matches.
As usual, I must acknowledge that an ace-based metric isn’t definitive. There’s more to court speed than what aces can tell us. It’s possible that the surface behaves differently as the grass is worn away, even if it doesn’t show up in serve stats. Since net approaches are increasingly rare, the service-box grass lasts longer than the baseline grass, meaning that the speed at which serves move through the court would be relatively unchanged. On the other hand, the biggest brown spots on court are behind the baseline, so most groundstrokes also bounce on green grass, not on brown dirt.
The best versus the best
Even the small difference between the last 8 and the rest of the tournament may not have anything to do with the decaying of the surface. Since 2000, the US Open has exhibited the same trend: 1.07 for week 1, 1.06 for round 4, and 0.97 for the final 8. (The Australian Open numbers are much noisier than the other slams, perhaps due to frequent use of the roof, so I’m hesitant to use them.)
It seems safe to assume that the hard courts in Flushing don’t suddenly get slower starting on Tuesday or Wednesday of the second week. Instead, I think the answer is in the mix of players–or more precisely, how those players interact with each other. By this ace-based metric, the Tour Finals have often been rated as one of the slowest indoor hard court events–even though the official Court Pace Index (CPI) ratings disagree.
In other words, aces tend to go down when the best play the best. Maybe the elites serve more tactically when facing tough opponents? Perhaps they focus more consistently on return, rarely allowing cheap aces? Maybe the best players know each other’s games so well that they anticipate even better than usual? This seems like an interesting line of research, even if it’s not something I’m going to resolve today.
The bottom line is that partly-brown Wimbledon courts play just about as fast as totally-green Wimbledon courts do. There might be a very minor slowdown toward the end of the fortnight, but even there, we should remain skeptical. The conditions are slow this year, but at least they won’t get much slower.