Wimbledon ‘24 - Hannah’s Final Thoughts

The brutal resilience of tennis never ceases to amaze: I honestly haven’t thought much about Andy Murray in the second week. I might not have thought of him at all on finals day, were it not for all the montages and an Instagram story he posted of his ‘healing’ back which is haunting me in all the wrong ways. Truly, it must be so hard to leave the stage, knowing how swiftly the show will move on without you.

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Speaking of resilience: I felt so much shame when Elina Svitolina spoke, with great dignity and utter heartbreak, after her win over Wang Xinyu, and her gallant defeat to Elena Rybakina. Because I want, so badly, for tennis to be my silly escape from realities I’m inadequate to meet. Svitolina, and her compatriots, aren’t playing to remind us that dreadful things are happening outside her bubble. But we should be reminded, all the same.

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People seemed to find the exchange between Alexander Zverev and Taylor Fritz at the net after their match funny. I suppose I did too, at least the instagram and petty press conference sniping bits of it. But to see Zverev physically interpose his body between Fritz and the umpire when Fritz would have walked off wasn’t funny. It was disturbing. Yes, Fritz could have stepped back and walked around Zverev, but you don’t think of that in the moment. You stay rooted to the spot, because you’re shocked, because some survival instinct short-circuits your brain and tells your body that someone who’s brazenly behaving this way, out in the open, is not to be trusted to respect the social contract most of us obey. 

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What would it take for the grass of Wimbledon to be deemed too dangerous for play? We know that ten days of rain, of grass stifling and sweating under covers, isn’t going to do it. Players aren’t going to stop coming to Wimbledon, no matter what it might cost them; just ask Novak Djokovic. Players aren’t going to stop running. It’s not going to stop raining. 

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Donna Vekic against Jasmine Paolini was the best match that’s ever made me feel dead inside for a full two days afterwards. And it wasn’t until I heard Pam Shriver, on the day 13 pod, repeat Vekic’s question to her – “Why did the crowd want Paolini to win?” – that I properly understood why. 

It’s so stupid of me to sit here and whine because people like what they like, but: She got nothing from the crowd. Luka Modric showed up for Djokovic or whoever but not for her. No Croatian journalists in the press room. Nothing but tutting and eye-rolling because she cried, because she sweated, because she shouted, because she was angry and sad. I get it: Paolini is an irrepressible whirlwind of joy. She’s connected with the crowd, and with The Barge, and with the fans. It’s not a criticism, and nobody has to justify supporting Paolini; I like Alcaraz for a lot of the same reasons, and anyway, people like what they like, we’re all just out here trying to escape, after all. 

It just made me sad that someone we’ve been watching since she was sixteen, someone we’ve seen try and fail and try and fail and fail and fail and fail to get where we thought she was destined to go in the game, someone who finally earned this chance at a Grand Slam final and showed the fuck up for three hours and played some of the best tennis she’s ever played – it made me sad that she got so little love. Because she cried, because she sweated, because she shouted, because she was angry and sad, because she made it look like the hard work that it is, because she’s been out there slogging her guts out for well over a decade and showed up bloodied and dusty and burdened instead of bursting into view all shiny and new. 

People don’t want to see struggle. They like a fantasy of ease. I’ve heard it about Andy Murray more times than I can count. Some of us make heavy weather even of our successes, and it’s hard to be around. I get it. I, too, like fun. It just made me sad.

Anyway, Donna: I thought you were wonderful.

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One of the memories of Wimbledon 2023 which left an enduringly sour taste in my mouth: Tenth seed Barbora Krejcikova being asked about her ‘Big Four’ comments. Krejcikova went bright red and was clearly mortified, but answered the question transparently. Then being asked about her mentor, Jana Novotna, and the thoughts and memories that must surface for Krejcikova at Wimbledon. That one, too, Krejcikova answered, talking as sincerely and gratefully as she always does about Novotna. But the acute discomfort I read on her face, and the way that she did her best to answer questions, stayed with me when I heard she retired in the second round, and stayed with me ever since. 

I’m so pleased to have some happier moments from Barbora Krejcikova at Wimbledon to take the sourness out of that memory. But one thing I’ll say about Krejcikova: If you ask her a question, she’ll give you an answer. That’s what we all claim we want tennis players to be able to do. I wish we didn’t, so often, punish them for it.*

On multiple occasions during the men’s final, Carlos Alcaraz would react so fast as to get a racquet on a ball that could/should/have been a clean winner, or cover so much of the court during a point that Novak Djokovic would end up hitting the ball out because there was nowhere in to put it where Alcaraz couldn’t reach it. And I would catch myself thinking, approvingly: ‘That was Jasmine Paolinini-esque.’ 

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I know I’m a curmudgeon about football. But you have to realize: We get one fortnight, one fortnight a year, where people aren’t talking about endless bloody football and instead are talking about tennis. To have that co-opted by the Euros, and then by England staying in the Euros, to the point that BBC radio missed a game and a half of the men’s final to play an audio montage of goals, was excruciating and I genuinely resented it. 

On the other hand, I’m not sure Carlos Alcaraz turns in that men’s final performance without the football. A deadline on the one hand, and feeling like you’re part of something bigger than yourself on the other, does wonders for some players.

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I felt strangely disembodied during the men’s final, split down the middle, unable to accommodate two distinct experiences: On the one hand, dumbfounded shock and hollow emptiness, watching a shadow of Novak Djokovic go through the motions. On the other, the type of blissful pleasure experienced by cartoon characters when the smell of cooling pies lifts them off their feet, as Carlos Alcaraz took full command of the stage to do the magnificent, reality-bending things he does. 

I wonder how early it dawned on Djokovic. Did he walk out on to Centre Court, maybe not feeling at the peak of his powers, but prepared enough that he could be reasonably certain of finding that winning, unstoppable Novak in himself when he needed it? Was it the first game, that 14-minute game that went Alcaraz’s way? Or was it when he didn’t immediately break back to take the knees (sorry) out from under Centre Court? Was it the first point, even? An instant where the racquet feels like a clumsy foreign object in the hand, where the ball you thought you were going to make thuds into the back wall?

I’m not a tennis player, but I am extremely well-versed in collapses of confidence: The sudden strangeness of things, the cold creeping over you, the increasing urgency with which you fumble, internally, for the certainty that was there a moment ago. I think it set in early for Djokovic, as early as the first game: I’m playing Carlos Alcaraz, and I don’t have it. I don’t have it in me today. And Centre Court is a pitiless eye.

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Filming the champions, trophies in hand, making their way through the Club after they leave Centre Court can feel uncomfortably intrusive. It’s also a priceless window into those first few minutes after winning Wimbledon, and the sheer volume of uncomfortable conversations you have to have with people in suits. 

One moment from each of the singles champions that felt like a glimpse into something particular and private about them:

Barbora Krejcikova, still holding the Venus Rosewater Dish, facing a semicircle made up of Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, Conchita Martinez, Marion Bartoli and Maria Sharapova, each of whom had just hugged and congratulated her. She faced them, and gave a funny, jerky bow, as if she was bowing to the Royal Box in the 1980s. Weird, wonderful and profoundly respectful.

Carlos Alcaraz, after he’d made slightly laborious chit-chat with the Princess of Wales and lifted the trophy on the balcony for the fans and said ‘Thank you! Thank you!’ to grandee after grandee, turning a corner into a corridor where for a few seconds he was no longer running a gauntlet of well-wishers. Alone but for several burly security personnel and the camera in his face, he let the beaming smile slip from his face, pressed both hands to his cheeks, sucked in a breath, and mouthed ‘Wow’ silently to himself. Then he turned the corner and the beaming smile and the ‘Thank you! Thank you!’s resumed. But for a second there, we saw it: The two-time Wimbledon champion redefining ‘meteoric’. The overwhelmed 21-year-old, hanging on for dear life.