Sport - Tennis

Wimbledon to stick to daytime tennis

WIMBLEDON: Night time tennis has arrived on Centre Court, but the long American tradition of breakfast at Wimbledon — or bagels in front of the television on championship weekend — is not endangered.

Such was the claim of Ian Ritchie, the chief executive of the All England Club, in an interview about the future impact of the new Centre Court roof.

“Building the roof was never done on the basis of, here’s a great commercial opportunity,” Ritchie said, while noting that the plan for the project predated his arrival as chief executive in 2005.

“It was built as an insurance against the weather and, to a lesser extent, the light.”

In other words, there is no intention to create separate day and night programmes, as there are at the U.S. and Australian Opens, or to move the women’s and men’s finals into a prime-time night slot.

“We have said pretty consistently that it is not something that is attractive to us, and that we consider Wimbledon to be a summer, outdoors event,” Ritchie said.

Ritchie said that the adding a night session would not be as lucrative an arrangement as many people believe because “ticket revenue is a relatively small proportion of the overall gross” at Wimbledon.

In addition, he said the tournament must always be mindful of its grass courts, unlike the hard courts, where, he said, “you can play all day and night.”

Even moving delayed matches from the outer courts into Centre Court to continue the day’s programme is not an enviable proposition, he said.

“We have generally kept the number of scheduled matches on any court to three,” he said.

“The three-match limit we try to abide by is probably as many games as you can play on it.”

He pointed out that Wimbledon had also held to the “anachronistic day off on a Sunday,” in large part to allow for some mid-tournament watering and maintenance of the courts.

He added, “The overriding reason for resisting night time scheduling was the fundamental belief of what the tournament should be.” — AP

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