Category: Withdrawals and Retirements

September 3, 1973: If You Want It That Badly

Billie Jean King suffering in the Forest Hills heat

The 1973 US Open reached the round of 16 without losing a single one of its eight women’s seeds. The big four of Margaret Court, Billie Jean King, Chris Evert, and Evonne Goolagong didn’t drop more than three games in a single set.

Tournament organizers expected more of the same on September 3rd. King was drawn against Julie Heldman, a fellow veteran who rarely gave Madame Superstar much of a challenge. In 18 meetings going back to 1960, Heldman had won just two. At the Virginia Slims of Boston in April, King double-bageled her.

With little hope of a close match, the ladies were assigned to the clubhouse court–Court 22–for their third-round match. Neither woman appreciated it. Billie Jean was accustomed to bigger venues, she felt she performed better in front of big crowds, and what’s more, the two-time champion deserved it. Heldman, despite her futility against King, was probably the strongest underdog in the eight ladies matches. Both competitors realized that an equivalent men’s match would’ve been scheduled on a show court.

Billie Jean performed as expected in the first set, coasting to a 6-3 lead. She dominated the net, a necessity on pock-marked Court 22. Bad bounces were frequent, so the first woman to move forward had an advantage. Even in better conditions, that was usually King. Heldman tried to counter the net-rushing with a “chip and dip” strategy of low balls–slice backhands and dipping topspin forehands–that would eat away at her opponent’s energy reserves. It wasn’t enough.

Five games into the second set, trailing 1-4, Heldman finally changed her tactics. If she couldn’t beat Billie Jean at the net, she could get there first. She served better, hit her spots with the forehand, and fought her way back into contention. King was visibly tiring, no longer competing for every point.

“Billie Jean can beat anybody when she’s running,” Julie said after the match. “But when she’s not, she’s mortal like the rest of us.”

Heldman ran out the set, 6-4, and took a 3-1 lead in the second. King’s movement kept getting worse. Coming into the tournament, all eyes had been on Billie Jean’s knee, the trouble spot that knocked her out of the Jersey Shore Classic three weeks earlier. She had consulted with famed knee man Dr. James Nicholas, the expert who handled the aching joints of Mickey Mantle and Joe Namath. Nicholas suggested a light weight-lifting regimen. While King felt good entering the tournament, the knee threatened to stop her again at any time.

But it wasn’t the knee. It was the heat. Or as the New York Times put it, it was the “three H’s–heat, humidity, and Heldman.” Doubled over in pain, King elected to keep going.

Billie Jean served the next game, but she wasn’t all there. She missed a low volley on the first point and once again winced in pain. Heldman knew better than to start thinking about a victory speech–she wondered if King was pulling a trick. Neither woman was above a bit of gamesmanship, and they weren’t exactly friends. The Old Lady had feigned illness before.

Heldman broke for 4-1. After a minute on the sidelines, Billie Jean didn’t move. Finally, Heldman asked the umpire if time was up. King answered for him: “If you want it that badly, you can have it.” The top seed retired from the match.

In Heldman’s memory, it was a classless move. “She didn’t look sick when she stormed off the court,” she later wrote of Billie Jean. “And why did she quit at 4-1 down in the third? No one does that. You just stand and take your medicine.”

Tournament physician Daniel Manfredi had a different opinion. King was taking penicillin for a cold, which could be dangerous in such extreme conditions. “She was lucky she decided to stop,” said Manfredi. “She could have collapsed.”

Whatever the truth of the matter, Heldman was quickly reminded that her victory had little meaning except in the context of September 20th. In 17 days, Billie Jean would take on Bobby Riggs. Reporters were more interested in that. With a bum knee and a near-collapse, could King handle the Happy Hustler? For all her protestations to the contrary, had Riggs psyched her out?

Bobby, as he always did, spun the upset in his favor. Not only did the challenger look fragile, King’s loss opened new vistas. “I’m glad the way it has worked out,” he said. “It may just give me another champion to beat.”

So, maybe Julie Heldman?

“Hell, no,” Heldman said. “He’d psych me out of it. Anybody can psych me.”

Well, anybody except for Billie Jean.

* * *

This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

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Flipping Coins in the Rain

The singles final in last week’s ITF M15 Antalya event was washed out by rain. It went in the books as a walkover victory for Giovanni Fonio over Juan Manuel Cerundolo. Doubles specialist Harri Heliovaara explains (from the Finnish, via Google translate, via Peter Wetz):

Namely, the ITF competitions were also played here last week, and the men’s final scheduled for Sunday of that competition could not be played at all due to the rain. Normally in that situation, each player only gets the ATP points and prize money of the losing finalist, but now the players threw themselves creatively and decided to decide the final winner with a coin toss. They agreed that the winner of the coin toss would receive a surrender win and thus the winner’s ATP points, while the loser would receive the winner’s prize money, so each received more than what would have resulted from not playing the final anyway.

This is indeed a clever solution, and one that was sometimes employed in the amateur era. When grass courts made up a bigger part of the tour and court maintenance in general was more primitive, it was more common for the tail end of events to be left unplayed. Usually the finalists (or semifinalists, in extreme cases) divided the prizes, but occasionally they resorted to a coin toss, especially in mixed doubles, which has always had a bit of an “exhibition” vibe.

While Fonio and Cerundolo benefited (in different ways) from the coin flip, parts of this scenario don’t quite smell right to me. First I’ll explain why, then I’ll offer a solution.

  1. The winning player gave his prize money to the loser. Change the context a tiny bit, and that’s match fixing.
  2. The ITF doesn’t have a provision in their rulebook for coin-flipping (as far as I know), so this solution only worked because the losing player agreed to claim an injury. Again, this is an unusual situation, but attesting to a fake injury is frowned upon, to say the least.
  3. Fonio gets some extra ranking points. Typically when tournaments are washed out, those points aren’t awarded, so it isn’t as if there is a precedent that Fonio or Cerundolo “deserved” those points. Instead, Fonio gains an unearned edge (albeit a small one) over several similarly-ranked players, who are presumably competing for entry and seeding in the same events.
  4. Players in other unfinished events–such as the Nur Sultan and Potchefstroom Challengers that were halted due to Covid-19 last March–didn’t get a chance to divide the unawarded points, by coin-flipping or any other method.

We can collapse these four points into two issues: First, there’s no ITF rule, so swapping points for prize money requires treading very close to some ethical and rule-breaking lines. Second, allowing players to improvise (sometimes? depending on the attitude of the on-site supervisor? I don’t know) inevitably gives an unearned advantage to some players over others.

Edit the rulebook

Fortunately, this is an easy fix. By providing a simple guideline for situations like this, the ITF can avoid the iffy behavior of prize-swapping and lying about injuries, ensure fairness for players across the whole tour, and do a better job of delivering the rewards that players expect when they show up for a tournament.

How about this:

Matches that cannot be played due to weather or force majeure will be decided by a coin flip, with ranking points awarded to the winner.

I’m not a lawyer, so my one-liner is probably missing a few paragraphs, but the main idea is pretty straightforward.

Prize money is trickier. Should anyone–“winner” or “loser”–receive prize money for unplayed matches? I don’t know. Tournaments–even the occasional ITF–earn revenue from ticket sales and broadcast rights, so they would surely prefer to hold back prize money from unplayed matches. On the other hand, players spend money and travel to events with the expectation that certain rewards are on offer.

Reap the benefits

The biggest gain in establishing this rule is consistency. As fans, we expect that sporting bodies treat players equally, and at the moment, handling unplayable matches is a real (if rare) source of inconsistency.

The other benefit is in guaranteeing at least some of what competitors have been promised. In several past articles, I’ve used metrics such as “expected points” to quantify how a player can expect to perform at a tournament. If he has a 50% chance of reaching the second round, he has a 50% chance of earning those points; if he has a 15% chance of winning the tournament, he has a 15% chance of earning those additional points. Most players don’t explicitly choose tournaments by predicting exact draws and calculating expected points, but many–including Heliovaara, incidentally–very much think in these terms.

If a tournament is forced to end early, those calculations–explicit or not–are worthless. As a qualifier and the fifth seed, respectively, Fonio and Cerundolo probably would’ve been happy with finalist points in Antalya. But what about the players who ended up making trips to Kazakhstan and South Africa last March for nothing better than quarter-finalist points?

As I’ve said above, we can debate whether tournaments should be expected to pay out prize money (and whether prize money should go to the coin-flip losers, as it did in Antalya), but there’s no reason for a similar dispute about ranking points. Sure, some players would get lucky in that a coin proclaims them the winner, but it’s not much different from finding oneself the beneficiary of a withdrawal, or even in a weak section of the draw.

Fonio and Cerundolo ended up with the right solution, and I’m glad the tournament supervisor didn’t stand in the way. I just wish the coin flip were standard practice, to avoid the ethical tightrope walk. I’m sure that players would appreciate the increased clarity, as well.

Grand Slam Prize Money Whack-a-Mole

Eagle-eyed Twitterer @juki_tennis noticed the following tweaks to the rules for the 2020 grand slams:

Let’s start with the first underlined section. I’ll get to the doubles tweak in a bit.

The ITF is learning that incentives are tricky. In the olden days, back when Adrian Mannarino still had hair, prize money was simple. If you played, you got some. If you didn’t, you got none. Players who get hurt right before one of the four biggest events of the season suffered in silence.

Except it’s never been quite that simple. The slams have spent the last decade taking turns breaking prize-money records, raising in particular the take for first-round losers. A spot in the main draw of the Australian Open is now worth $63,000 USD ($90,000 AUD). Some players in the qualifying draw barely make that much in an entire season. Whatever one’s hangups about honesty or fair play, if you have a chance to grab that check, you take it.

The same logic applies whether you’re healthy or injured. The last decade or so of grand slam tennis has been littered with first-round losers who weren’t really fit to compete. That’s bad for the tournaments, bad for the fans, and probably not that great for the players themselves, even if $63k does buy a lot of physiotherapy.

Paid withdrawals

Two years ago, the ITF took aim at the problem. Players with a place in the main draw could choose to withdraw and still collect 50% of first-round loser prize money. The ATP does something similar, giving on-site withdrawals full first-round loser prize money for up to two consecutive tournaments. The ATP’s initiative has been particularly successful, cutting first-round retirements at tour-level events from a 2015 high of 48 to only 20 in 2019. In percentage terms, that’s a decline from 4.4% of first-round matches to only 1.6%.

The results at slams are cloudier. On the men’s side, there were nine first-round retirements in 2010, and nine in 2019. The ITF’s incentives might not be sufficient: 50% of first-round prize money is still a substantial sum to forego. In fairness to the slams, retirements may not tell the whole story. A hobbled player can still complete a match, and perhaps the prize money adjustment has convinced a few more competitors to give up their places in the main draw.

None of this, however, keeps out players who consciously game the system. Both the ATP and WTA allow injured players to use their pre-injury rankings to enter a limited number of events upon their return. Savvy pros maximize those entries (“protected” in ATP parlance, and “special” in WTA lingo) by using them where the prize pots are richest and, if possible, bridging the gap with wild cards into smaller events.

Emblematic of such tactics is Dmitry Tursunov, who played (and lost) his last six matches at majors, all using protected rankings. Two of those, including his final grand slam match at the 2017 US Open against Cameron Norrie, ended in retirement. Three of the others were straight-set losses. In one sense, Tursunov “earned” those paydays. He was ranked 31st going into Wimbledon in 2014, then missed most of the following 18 months. Upon return, he followed ATP tour rules. But with the increasingly disproportionate rewards available at slams, protected rankings seem sporting only when used as part of a concerted comeback effort.

While the ITF’s late-withdrawal policy wasn’t in place for Tursunov, it’s easy to imagine a player in a similar situation taking advantage. And that’s the gap that the latest tweak aims to plug. The new rule is not limited to players on protected or special rankings, which typically require absences of six months, not just one. Yet the idea is similar. You can no longer enter, turn up on site, plead injury, and take home tens of thousands of dollars … unless you’ve competed recently. It’s a low bar, but it raises the standard a bit for players who want to take home a $30,000 check.

One of two prongs

The rule adjustment wouldn’t have affected Tursunov’s lucrative protected-ranking tour of 2016-17. However, had the Russian come back from injury a couple of years later, his income might not have gone uncontested.

In 2019, both Roland Garros and Wimbledon invoked another rarely-used clause in the rulebook. It requires that players “perform to a professional standard,” and a failure to do so can result in fines up to the amount of first-round prize money. Anna Tatishvili–using a special ranking–was docked her full paycheck at the French Open, and Bernard Tomic–a convenient whipping boy whenever this sort of thing comes up–lost his take-home from the All England Club. Both fines were appealed, and Tatishvili’s was overturned. (Tomic’s should have been, too.)

What matters for the purposes of today’s discussion isn’t the size of Tatishvili’s bank account, but the fact that the majors have dug the “professional standard” clause out of cold storage. It’s worth quoting the various factors that the rulebook spells out as possibly contributing to a violation of the standard:

  • the player did not complete the match
  • the player did not compete in the 2-3 week period preceding the Grand Slam
  • the player retired from the last tournament he/she played before the Grand Slam
  • the player was using a Protected or Special Ranking for entry
  • the player received a Code Violation for failure to use Best Efforts

Every major has a few players who are skirting the line, perhaps returning to action a bit sooner than they would have if the grand slam schedule were different. With the fines in 2019, the ITF has made clear that they expect to see credible performances from all 256 main draw players. And with the prize money adjustment for 2020, the governing body has closed the door on five-figure paydays for players who shouldn’t have been on the entry list, even if they never take the court.

I promised to talk about doubles

The second section of the rulebook quoted above is a bit problematic, because I believe it is missing a key “not” in the opening sentence. Unless the ITF has some bizarre and unprecedented goals, the intention of the doubles regulations is to discourage singles players from retiring in doubles unless they are truly injured, and to prevent singles players from even entering doubles unless they plan to take it seriously.

Doubles prize money pales next to the singles pot, but even first-round losers in men’s and women’s doubles will take home $17,500 USD per team, or $8,750 per player. That’s enough to convince most singles players to enter if their ranking makes the cut, no matter how little they care about doubles during the 44 non-slam weeks of the year.

The majors determine which teams make the doubles cut the same way that ATP and WTA tour events do. Teams are ordered by their combined singles or doubles ranking. Each player can use whichever is better. The tours allow pros to use their singles rankings to encourage superstars to play doubles, and at events like Indian Wells, many big names do take part. At the slams, the bigger effect is on the next rung of singles players, giving us oddball doubles teams such as Mackenzie McDonald/Yoshihito Nishioka and Lukas Lacko/John Millman at the 2018 US Open.

As with other details of the entry process, most fans couldn’t care less. But they should. Whenever the rules let one team in, they leave another team out. By including more singles players in the doubles draw, the standard for full-time doubles players is made almost impossibly strict. An up-and-coming men’s singles player can crack the top 100–and gain admission to grand slam main draws–with a solid season on the challenger tour, but even the best challenger-level doubles teams are often left scrambling for partners whose singles rankings are sufficient to gain entry.

This year’s rulebook edit should help matters, at least a bit. (As long as someone inserts the missing “not,” anyway.) Grand slam doubles is not an exhibition, and it shouldn’t be contested by players who treat it that way. The ATP and WTA should follow suit, penalizing players who withdraw from doubles only to prove their health by continuing to play singles.

Incentives and intentions

These rule changes, while technical, are aimed at something rather simple: to ensure that the players who enter slam main draws–both singles are doubles–are healthy and motivated to play. The latest tweaks won’t close every loophole, and we can expect more disputes over issues like the Tatishvili and Tomic fines.

The bigger issue, complicated by the on-site withdrawal adjustment, is the underlying purpose of the rise in first-round loser prize money. The slams represent a huge proportion of the season-long prize pool, especially for players between approximately 50th and 110th in the ATP and WTA rankings. These competitors miss the cut for many of the most prestigious Masters and Premier tournaments. Even in later rounds, they are usually playing for four-figure stakes–if that. Four times a year, pros with double-digit rankings get a guaranteed cash infusion, and the potential for much more.

The presence of the four majors effectively funds the rest of the season for many players. The slams have upped first-round prize money–both nominally and relative to increases in later-round awards–partly in recognition of that fact. It is expensive to be a touring pro, and without paydays from the majors, it can easily be a money-losing endeavor.

Salary, not prize money

The majors rely on the less-lucrative tours for year-round publicity and a pool of highly-skilled players to drive fans and media attention to their mega-events. Much of the first-round loser prize money is in recognition of that fact. No one really thinks that the 87th-best player in the world deserves $63k just for showing up and giving Serena Williams a mild 59-minute workout. But does the 87th-best player in the world deserve to collect annual revenue of $250k–a figure that will largely go to cover travel, training, coaching, and equipment expenses? I think so, it appears that the slams think so, and I suspect you do, too.

So, when the ITF closes loopholes like these, keep in mind that they are operating within the silly $63k-per-hour framework, not the more reasonable $250k-per-season model. It is an important goal to ensure the integrity and quality of play at slams, but it ought to be paired with an effort to support tennis’s rank-and-file, even when those journeymen are injured.

A more sensible policy would be to separate much of the first-round loser prize pool from the literal act of playing a first round match. Perhaps the slams could each contribute $7.5 million each year–that’s $30k per singles player–to a general fund that would disburse annual grants to players ranked outside the top fifty, and lower every singles award by the same amount. (The details would be devilish, starting with these few parameters.) Such an approach would come out in the wash for most players, who would simply receive the extra $30k per slam in a different guise. But it would help injured players return to top form, and it would leave plenty of money for high-stakes combat at the sport’s biggest stages. Such a solution, of course, would require a lot more than a few minor edits to the rulebook.

The Unalarming Rate of Grand Slam Retirements

Italian translation at settesei.it

Yesterday, Vitalia Diatchenko proved to be even less of a match for Serena Williams than expected. She retired down 6-0, 2-0, winning only 5 of 37 points. She also sparked the usual array of questions about how Grand Slam prize money–$39,500 for first-round losers–incentivizes players to show up and collect a check even if they aren’t physically fit to play.

Diatchenko wasn’t the only player to exit yesterday without finishing a match. Of the 32 men’s matches, six ended in retirement. On the other hand, none of those were nearly as bad. All six injured men played at least two sets, and five of them won a set.

The prominence of Serena’s first-round match, combined with the sheer number of Monday retirements, is sure to keep pundits busy for a few days proposing rule changes. As we’ll see, however, there’s little evidence of a trend, and no need to change the rules.

Men’s slam retirements in context

Before yesterday’s bloodbath, there had been only five first-round retirements in the men’s halves of this year’s Grand Slams. The up-to-date total of 11 retirements is exactly equal to the annual average from 1997-2014 and the same as the number of first-round retirements in 1994.

The number of first-round Slam retirements has trended up slightly over the last 20 years. From 1995 to 2004, an average of ten men bowed out of their first-round matches each year. From 2005 to 2014, the average was 12.2–in large part thanks to the total of 19 first-round retirements last season.

That rise represents an increase in injuries and retirements in general, not a jump in unfit players showing up for Slams. From 1995 to 2004, an average of 8.5 players retired or withdrew from Slam matches after the first round, while in the following ten years, that number rose to 10.8.

Retirements at other tour-level events tell the same story. At non-Slams from 1995-2004, the retirement rate was about 1.3%, and in the following ten years, it rose to approximately 1.8%. (There isn’t much of a difference between first-round and later-round retirements at non-Slams.)

Injury rates in general have risen–exactly what we’d expect from a sport that has become increasingly physical. Based on recent results, we shouldn’t be surprised to see more retirements in best-of-five matches, as most of yesterday’s victims would’ve survived to the end of a best-of-three contest.

Women’s slam retirements

In most seasons, the rate of first-round retirements in women’s Grand Slam draws is barely half of the corresponding rate in other tour events.

In the last ten years, just over 1.2% of Slam entrants have quit their first-round match early. The equivalent rate in later Slam rounds is 1.1%, and the first-round rate at non-Slam tournaments is 2.26%. Diatchenko was the fifth woman to retire in a Slam first round this year, and if one more does so today, the total of six retirements will be exactly in line with the 1.2% average.

One painful anecdote isn’t a trend, and the spotlight of a high-profile match shouldn’t give any more weight to a single data point. Even with the giant checks on offer to first-round losers, players are not showing up unfit to play any more often than they do throughout the rest of the season.

Facts, Figures and Myths About Walkovers

Novak Djokovic advanced to the final of the Miami Masters today when Kei Nishikori withdrew from the event due to injury. Oddly, it was the second match at the Sony Open that Djokovic didn’t have to play, as Florian Mayer pulled out before their scheduled third round match.

It’s a rare occurrence in professional tennis–so rare that it had only happened once since 1968, when several players benefited from multiple walkovers at the French Open. In Miami two years ago, Andy Murray also skipped his third round and semifinal matches, as both Milos Raonic and Rafael Nadal dropped out due to injury.

The fact that it was Djokovic who got the free pass immediately gave rise to all sorts of speculation. Will the lack of match play hurt the Serbian? Does Novak get more walkovers than most? Are opponents more likely to withdraw if they’re facing a top player?

Let’s take these questions in order. I addressed a similar issue a couple of years ago in this post. Walkovers are rare, but the available evidence suggests that there’s no positive or negative effect from winning via withdrawal. A player’s chances of winning his next match are roughly what they would’ve been anyway.

Djokovic does gain from walkovers more often than the average player, but he’s far from the top of the list. Opponents have withdrawn five times in his 695 matches, good for 0.7%, roughly the same rate as opponents of Murray, Nadal, Roger Federer … and Donald Young and Dmitry Tursunov. Jo Wilfried Tsonga has benefited from six walkovers in 432 matches, a 1.3% rate, highest among tour veterans.

Top players win by walkover more often than others–but as we’ll see in a moment, it isn’t because they are top players. It’s intuitive to figure that mildly injured players are more likely to take the court if they think they have a better chance of winning, but the evidence suggests there’s little, if any, effect.

Men ranked in the top five win by walkover 0.6% of the time, while those in the next five get free passes 0.3% of the time, and most of the rest of the pack benefits at the tour average rate of 0.2%–once every 500 matches. (All of these aggregate rates are based on tour-level matches from 1991 through 2014 Indian Wells.)

For the most part, top players get walkovers because they hang around until the late rounds of tournaments. Walkovers occur at the highest rate in the quarterfinals of events, when 1.1% of matches end before they begin. Round-of-16 contests are almost as bad, at 1.0%, and semifinals are also considerably more walkover-prone than average, at 0.6%.

When we take these dangerous middle rounds out of the equation, the number of walkovers shrinks, as does the difference between top players and the rest of the pack. Less than 0.15% of pre-R16 matches end in walkover, and the rate at which top-five players benefit from them falls to 0.4%. That’s still more frequent than the rate for the rest of the field, but keep in mind the tiny numbers we’re dealing with here. It’s 13 walkovers in over 3000 matches. Take away five of those withdrawals–roughly two per decade–and the top five would benefit at the same rate as players ranked 16-20.

It’s not as interesting a narrative, but it appears that players usually withdraw when they are too injured to compete, and that’s most likely to happen midway through a tournament. The highest-ranked players benefit–because of their previous success on the court, not their intimidating influence off of it.

Trends and Perspective on WTA Retirements and Withdrawals

Yesterday, there was no women’s singles at Indian Wells. Both Victoria Azarenka and Sam Stosur pulled out of their quarterfinal matches, presenting a very obvious target for anyone concerned about an injury bug in women’s tennis.

Last year, WTA retirements hit an all-time high of 4.8% of tour-level matches, almost a full percentage point above the 3.9% of matches that were not completed in 2006.  While part of the injury total was due to stomach bugs in China and food poisoning at Indian Wells, the overall trend has been upward for about 30 years:

WTArets

While it’s less clear that players are any more likely to pull out of Grand Slam matches (the dark red line in the graph above), there’s no doubt that more WTA matches are ending due to injury than they did 10, 20, or 30 years ago.

In a moment, I’ll explain why this is happening, and why the trend is unlikely to reverse itself anytime soon.  But first, some perspective on yesterday’s programming disaster.

Since there was nothing else to talk about yesterday in the world of women’s tennis, it was inevitable that the subject of injuries dominated. (Thanks to Federer vs. Nadal on the card, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.) Taking a tournament-wide view, though, this year’s Indian Wells WTA event has been a positive on the health front.

Women’s tennis has seen more than 1 in 50 tour-level matches end with W/O or RET in the score for more than 15 years.  Yesterday’s two withdrawals were the first two incomplete matches of the entire event–including qualifying!  Assuming we get through the semifinals and final without any further problems, that’s 93 of 95 (97.9%) of main draw matches complete, and 129 of 131 (98.5%) of main draw and qualifying matches complete.  Last year, while food poisoning dominated the headlines, there were at least three injury-related retirements from the singles draw, and two years ago, there were five.

These two quarterfinal withdrawals were bad news for television and fans, but they don’t represent a trend.

High stakes, high risk

While Indian Wells has been mostly injury-free, it also shouldn’t be seen as a trend in the positive direction.  WTA players (and ATPers, for the same reasons) are going to keep showing up at tournaments less than 100%, developing health problems midway through tournaments, and generally not finishing all the matches they start.

This isn’t because of too many hard courts, slower balls, mandatory events, doping, or even runaway racquet technology.  It’s because the financial stakes in tennis–and with it, severe inequality in the ranks–are climbing even faster than the injury rate.  The level of fitness required to compete at the highest level is always increasing, and players are forced to choose between trying to keep up or probably falling away.

A simpler example of this phenomenon, and one that makes it easier to illustrate the point, is in competitive distance running.  Marathoners rarely run more than two marathons per year, and there is very little room at the top.  Run a marathon in 2:04 and you’re a superstar. 2:05 or 2:06 and the sponsors will keep supporting you.  If you can’t break 2:10, you’re probably working full-time at a local shoe store.

The most straightforward way to improve your marathon time is to train harder, whether that means more mileage over a several-month training period or more aggressive workouts.  When the choice is between 2:05 and oblivion, the incentives are heavily structured toward overly aggressive training.  There’s not much difference between finishing with a 2:10 compared to overtraining, getting injured, and not finishing at all.

Tennis, of course, is a bit more forgiving.  You don’t need to be one of the top 10 in the world to make a decent living, but then again, to remain in the top 10, you must consistently beat players on the fringes of the top 100, where the incentives are not that different from those in distance running.

As the stakes increase, players are more willing to skirt the edge between hard training and over training.  And while players are getting closer to that line, they are hardly going too far–at least according to their own incentives.  Sure, we’d like to have seen Vika play yesterday, but a few retirements over the course of the year isn’t going to stop her from regaining the #1 ranking.  Two years ago, she pulled out of her quarterfinal with Caroline Wozniacki after only three games–and then started a twelve-match winning streak the following week.

If there were more matches on clay, players would simply push themselves harder on clay courts.  (Anyway, there is almost exactly the same percentage of WTA retirements on clay as there are on hard.)  Same thing if the balls played faster.  If there were fewer mandatory events, we’d see top players engaging in longer periods of hard training. Probably more exhibitions, too.

There are no incentives–nor should there be–for players to stay healthy for the duration of 100% of their matches.  If we want the best players in the world to entertain us with the best possible tennis they can play, retirements and withdrawals are something we’ll have to learn to accept.  We won’t get one without the other.

Janko Tipsarevic and the Masters of Retirement

When Janko Tipsarevic retired six points away from defeat against Jerzy Janowicz on Friday, many tennis fans were … unsurprised.   The Serb has quite the record when it comes to quitting early, having retired from matches at all four Grand Slams, the Olympics, and nearly half of the Masters 1000 events.  He has retired on every surface and in every round.

It’s hardly a record to be proud of.  Tipsarevic’s departure on Friday was his 17th career tour-level retirement–about 1 in every 25 matches over his 434-match career.  His “retirement rate” of 3.9% is the highest among active players with at least 400 matches.  It’s more than double the tour average of about 1.5%.

But that “at least 400” hides some context.  Expand the field to a still-respectable minimum of 200 tour-level matches and we have the following leaders in career retirement rate:

Player              Matches  Ret Rate  
Sergiy Stakhovsky       209      4.8%  
Michael Llodra          370      4.6%  
Yen Hsun Lu             222      4.5%  
Janko Tipsarevic        434      3.9%  
Denis Istomin           211      3.8%  
Paul Henri Mathieu      456      3.7%  
Filippo Volandri        367      3.5%  
Potito Starace          347      3.5%  
Xavier Malisse          531      3.0%  
Viktor Troicki          300      3.0%

Tipsy is still a standout, yet not an egregious one.  Both Paul Henri Mathieu and Xavier Malisse have retired in three of the four slams.  Michael Llodra has dropped out of Wimbledon three times, and the US Open twice.  (Not to mention retiring against Jo Wilfried Tsonga three times, and perhaps more remarkably, against both Tipsarevic and Mathieu.)

For a fuller view of the state of ATP retirement–including the 22 members of the top 100 who have never done so–click here for a sortable table with more fun stats.  (A few numbers are different than above, because my full database doesn’t yet include 2012 Bercy.)  Janko may quit early, but that doesn’t mean you have to.

Withdrawal Effects

Italian translation at settesei.it

Yesterday, Mardy Fish withdrew from his fourth-round match against Roger Federer.  As we saw earlier today, Federer may gain some benefit from the extra rest, but with the additional rest days built into the grand slam schedule, Roger runs the risk of getting too little time on court.

What’s the true effect, then?  Will the extra rest make Federer an even bigger favorite in his quarterfinal match against Tomas Berdych?  Or will match-court rust hold him back?

As it turns out, there is virtually no effect.  Players handed a walkover win almost exactly half of their next matches, and a closer look at those matches reveals that 50% is about what we would’ve expected from them, walkover or not.

To hunt for a potential relationship, I found 139 ATP main draw walkovers since 2001 where the winner went on to play another match at the same tournament–in other words, excluding finals.  While it may seem that players tend to withdraw when they’re least likely to win a match (as with Fish this week, or like the other two players to withdraw before facing Federer this year), there’s nothing to that theory, either. The average pre-match odds of the withdrawing player are about 51%.

Thus, we can work on the assumption that there’s little bias in the pool of 139 men who received a free pass to the next round.  For every Federer, there’s a Donald Young advancing uncontested over Richard Gasquet.  Balancing the withdrawals of players without a chance may be higher-ranked players who are quicker to withdraw because their success allows them to play it safe and make longer-term decisions.

In the 139 follow-up matches, our players went 67-72, winning 48.2% of the time.  Prematch predictions (generated by Jrank) would have projected a winning percentage of 48.9%.

If we narrow the search to slams, we get a nearly-meaningless pool of only 12 matches.  The player coming off the walkover went 6-6; prematch numbers would’ve predicted 7-5.  Perhaps rust does play a small part; considerably more likely is that the walkover simply doesn’t affect the beneficiary.

For Federer fans, though, there’s little reason for concern.  This is the ninth time in his career he’s advanced via walkover, and he’s only lost the next match twice.  One of those was in 2002.  The other was in Indian Wells in 2008.  The man who beat Fed?  Mardy Fish.