The downhill walk from Southfields Underground station to the All England Club takes around 15 minutes. Crowds of ticket holders and hopeful queuers mill past cute rows of terraces that detach into larger properties, before No 1 Court rises into view.
On the fourth day of the 2024 Championships, the crowds filed past the boater-hat sellers, coffee machines, pedicabs blaring dance music — and a new, temporary sign, tied to a pale red fence with string.
Advertisement
“POLLING STATION” it reads, next to a blue plaque for Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady of the United States who was educated at the Marie Souvestre school that once stood on the site.
A U.K. general election, American Independence Day, ball on racket on grass. Welcome to a Fourth of July that promised to be like no other in SW19.
At the last general election, Wimbledon was one of the closest-fought constituencies in the U.K. The Conservative Party regained the seat in 2005, but in 2019, Stephen Hammond held on by just 628 votes. He received 38.4 per cent of the vote in a narrow victory over the Liberal Democrat candidate Paul Kohler. Kohler’s opponent this year is Danielle Dunfield-Prayero, a former British triathlete who replaced Hammond after he announced he would stand down before the election, ending a 20-year stint in politics.
On the eve of the election, that tension appeared to evaporate behind the black gates, emblazoned with the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club (AELTC)’s gold lettering. Britain’s Emma Raducanu, who faces Greek No 9 seed Maria Sakkari in the third round today (Friday), was asked on Wednesday about going to vote before practice.
“No,” she said, smiling.
“I’ll have a lie-in, then I’ll come to practice. I didn’t even know it was tomorrow, to be honest. Thanks for letting me know.”
Katie Boulter, world No 29, and Jack Draper, world No 28, faced fellow Britons Harriet Dart and Cameron Norrie in singles matches on election day; Dart and Norrie would run out winners in two results that went against expectations. Also asked about the election on Wednesday, Boulter said, “I’ll stick to tennis,” while Draper, when asked if he took any interest in politics, simply replied “no”.
Singularity of focus is not all that unusual in tennis. Many players, including women’s world No 1 Iga Swiatek, are so fastidious they don’t like knowing their potential routes through draws; some don’t even want to know their next opponent until the last moment.
Advertisement
In the heat of a Grand Slam fortnight, the smallest thing can be a fatal distraction in a sport of fine margins. Wimbledon is also a workplace, in which the players are contractors — it is unsurprising they might not be drawn on the future of their nation in the equivalent of their office.
This year, just outside that office and its high, spiked gates, on that walk up or down Church Road, protesters have stood with placards protesting the All England Club’s proposed expansion into Wimbledon Park. The plans include building 39 grass courts, including a show court with 8,000 seats. The plans, which would increase Wimbledon’s footprint from 42 to 115 acres, are partly about moving the annual qualifying tournament before the Championships proper from Roehampton to be local to the main tournament site.
GO DEEPER
Protests, petitions and TV stars' £65m golf club sale: Inside Wimbledon expansion row
This is in line with the other three Grand Slams in Paris, New York, and Melbourne. More politically, the plans are about Wimbledon maintaining its prestige and improving its facilities to keep up its global status. The changes would be good for tennis; some residents, who voted for their MP on Thursday, say it will turn the area into a tennis theme park. The plans have been referred to City Hall, after Merton and Wandsworth Councils approved and rejected them respectively, and in recent times the debate has turned nasty, with accusations of vandalism and criminal damage on both sides.
As David Law, tennis commentator and co-host of the Tennis Podcast, told The Athletic last year, “I’m biased — I work in tennis. I don’t live in the area and the things that people are objecting to don’t affect me.”
On the tournament’s opening day, protests criticising Barclays’ sponsorship of Wimbledon could be heard inside the grounds. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign amassed more than 100 people in protest of the bank’s financial relationship with nine defence companies that supply Israel. Palestinian flags and posters connecting strawberries — the fruit intrinsically linked to Wimbledon — to blood joined the boaters and the coffee carts winding down from Southfields station.
Advertisement
A spokesperson for the AELTIC said: “Barclays is an important partner of ours and we are working closely with them in a number of areas.”
In the previous two years, geopolitics also made their way on to the courts. The All England Club’s decision to ban Russian and Belarusian players in 2022, which was out of step with the other Grand Slams, had knock-on effects for every player in the draw, after the ATP and WTA tours responded by stripping the tournament of its ranking points. The policy was reversed in 2023, but Belarusian and Russian players remain unable to formally represent their countries, and Belarusian and Russian flags remain banned.
GO DEEPER
Hugs, handshakes and blanking your opponent: How geopolitics is impacting Wimbledon
At the pre-tournament briefing, chairman Deborah Jevans and chair of the board Sally Bolton confirmed no new flags, including those of Israel and Palestine, had been added to the banned list.
For Ukrainian and Russian players, those last two years have made geopolitical apathy impossible; the same is true of Belarusians.
At the start of 2024, Ukraine’s Elina Svitolina, who reached the semi-finals here on a wave of vocal and partisan support at a tournament that isn’t known for its outspokenness, told The Athletic “the whole motivation around me” of Russia’s invasion of her country has been central to her tennis since it began. Men’s sixth seed Andrey Rublev has written “no war please” on television cameras; Daria Kasatkina, this year’s No 14 seed in the women’s draw, has condemned the war and admitted she fears the possible consequences for her family.
More broadly, tennis has become a political football, as those at the top of the sport fight to determine its trajectory.
The ATP and WTA and the entities that control the four Grand Slams are expected to reach a compromise between the current schedule, which makes tennis both a global media constant and a drain on players’ fitness, and the so-called premier tour, devised by the Grand Slams and centred on their four events and a clutch of the Masters 1000 tournaments, one level below them.
Looming over these discussions is the incursion of Saudi Arabia into tennis. Its Public Investment Fund (PIF) sponsors the men’s and women’s rankings. The end-of-year tournament finals for the women, one of the biggest paydays of the year, will be held in Riyadh for the next three years.
GO DEEPER
Saudi Arabia's takeover of world sport: Football, golf, boxing and now tennis?
Tennis for one day in the UK in July and globally for at least two years has never been more political — no matter the extent to which its players might prefer that it is not.
Inside the tall black gates, Wimbledon’s day four felt much like any other.
There will be meetings of the sport’s politicians come the second week, as they continue to thrash out the future of tennis. The manicured lawns looked just as green; the strawberries and cream just as red and white. There were more British flags than usual, less a display of electoral patriotism than a reminder of the two all-British matches taking place, before Andy Murray started his farewell to SW19 in the doubles with brother Jamie on Centre Court, followed by a touching tribute led by tennis stars from around the globe.
Advertisement
This is, after all, a private club, with a little under 400 full members and a selection process that requires support from four of those existing members for the prospective entrant to even be considered.
Enhancements of the grounds are largely funded by debentures, which provide a good seat on one of Centre and No 1 Court for five years. For 2021 through 2025, a Centre Court debenture cost £80,000 ($100,000). A tasting menu at the peak of hospitality, Le Gavroche on the Lawn run by Michel Roux Jr, is more than £2,000 per person; the cheapest private table, at the Lawn, is £885.
A hawk patrols the skies to prevent birds sh***ing on players and the grass. Security is tight. Queues are the norm. There is a Royal Box. The patron is Catherine, Princess of Wales, who ordinarily walks on to Centre Court to deliver trophies, but her attendance is unconfirmed this year as she undergoes cancer treatment.
On the surface, it is a tightly controlled bubble, a deliberate and idyllic separation from the wider world, including general elections.
These are the prices and parcels of an illusion. Wimbledon’s iconography — the white kits, the lawns, the strawberries and cream, the Pimm’s, the queues — are intrinsic to the tournament, but also radiate an inherent ‘small c’ conservatism. Don’t make too much noise, don’t be too loud, keep off the grass, embrace British summer in all its Britishness, in a similar way to the Great British Bake Off’s guardianship of culinary insularity conducted through slices of Victoria sponge cake and lemon drizzle. After chants of “USA” reverberated around Court 18 during his five-set win on Thursday, American Ben Shelton, who grew up in the amphitheatre of college tennis in the U.S., noted that the tournament was “too polite” for that kind of atmosphere.
At 10pm, as the exit poll came in declaring a Labour landslide victory — albeit with a lower vote share than in 2019, an election which the party lost — the exits at the All England Club were wide open, spectators streaming out after Murray’s tribute and back into the wider world. In an eerie, after-the-Lord-Mayor’s-show atmosphere on Court One, Denmark’s Caroline Wozniacki and Leylah Fernandez thudded the ball back and forth under the roof, sealed off from the outside world.
Earlier in the day, that immediate outside world voted overwhelmingly for Paul Kohler, with the Liberal Democrats taking the Wimbledon seat in Parliament, gaining 6.8 per cent of the vote while the Conservatives lost 17.6 per cent.
Advertisement
Kohler is a Merton Liberal Democrat, against the All England Club’s expansion plans — his position is for the qualifying tournament to use the earmarked land, but only on a temporary basis each year.
Inside the All England Club, Wimbledon’s iconography and ideology adds up to something that seems benign and quaint: the Wimbledonness of Wimbledon, the soul of the tournament. It acts, intentionally or not, as an insulating force against the All England Club’s place in the constituency that contains it, and against its importance as a local issue as residents went to the polls that morning, when they were walking down Church Road to Eleanor Roosevelt’s former school, just as those here for the tennis did on the morning of July 4.
From the outside, they are just as political as the protests and the posters on Church Road, separated only by those tall black gates.
(Top photo: Max Mathews / The Athletic)
