Quickest Wimbledon final
Quickest Wimbledon final. The Wimbledon tournament in England has seen both long and short matches due to the fact that tennis matches have no time limit.
Before 2018, it was the only major tournament that didn’t feature a tie-break rule in the last set of a match. Read on to learn about the longest and shortest matches ever played at the Wimbledon event, which has been running for nearly 150 years.
Longest matches
When the last set was tied at 6-6, Wimbledon didn’t have a tie break rule. This meant that a player needed to win the final set by two games in order to win a match. Isner and Mahut’s first-round Wimbledon encounter demonstrated how this rule might lead to a long tennis match.
In a match that lasted 11 hours and 5 minutes (665 minutes) and took place over three days, Isner defeated Mahut 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 70-68.
As a result of his fast serve, Isner won all of his serving games, but he was unable to break Mahut’s serve until the 137th game of the fifth and final set when Isner was serving.
One of the reasons Wimbledon instituted a tie break rule was due to the epic final set that lasted over eight hours. After a final set score of 12-12, a tie-break game will be implemented in accordance with the new rule. Despite the fact that this restriction is specific to Wimbledon, it prevents matches like the one between Isner and Mahut from becoming marathons.
It took six and a half hours and thirty-three minutes for the longest match at the other majors. Wimbledon’s potential for protracted matches was demonstrated by this, which led to the regulation modification.
As of 2013, the longest-ever women’s match at Wimbledon has been Chanda Rubin’s victory over Patricia Hy-Boulais of France in 1985. Only one other women’s tennis singles match at Wimbledon has ever lasted this long, and this is more than double what it should have.
Shortest matches
In addition to the lengthy matches, Wimbledon has also featured a fair number of matches that were decided in a relatively short amount of time. Tennis matches that are played out to the best of three usually take around an hour and a half, while those played out to the best of five typically take about two hours and 45 minutes.
When Sue Tott defeated Marion Boundy in a best-of-3 match in 1969, the victory took only twenty minutes and was recorded as the shortest ever best-of-3 match. This match, which took place in the first round of the tournament, holds the record for being the shortest match that has ever been played at Wimbledon. Although Tott would go on to lose the subsequent round, he would achieve something that had not been done before or since.
In the final of Wimbledon in 1922, Suzanne Lenglen defeated Molla Mallory in only 23 minutes, winning 6-2, 6-0. This match took place almost forty years before the 20-minute match. This is the record for the quickest amount of time needed to finish a match in a final at Wimbledon.
Three years later, in the championship match, Lenglen prevailed against Joan Fry in just 25 minutes. In the 1920s, when Lenglen competed in the finals of the Wimbledon tournament, he was an extremely effective tennis player.
Since that time, there have not been many times recorded that are comparable to the times that Lenglen was able to complete. The men’s singles final at Wimbledon in 1881 was the shortest match in the tournament’s history.
William Renshaw defeated John Hartley in this match, which lasted only 36 minutes and was decided by a score of 6-0, 6-1, and 6-1 in favor of Renshaw. This works out to 12 minutes for each set and 1.8 minutes for each game on average. Renshaw demonstrated his domination and would eventually go on to win a total of six more Wimbledon events. Prior to this, Hartley had won the previous two Wimbledon competitions.