Competition

Wimbledon

Also Known As The Championships

Grand Slam Tennis Championships

The Championships, Wimbledon, the oldest tennis tournament in the world, played on grass courts at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in London since 1877; widely regarded as the most prestigious event in the sport. It is one of tennis's four Grand Slam tournaments, alongside the Australian Open, French Open and US Open, and the only one of the four still played on grass. Wimbledon and the other Grand Slams were amateur-only events for most of their history; the Open era, which began in 1968, was the change that let professional players compete alongside amateurs for the first time, ending a restriction that had shaped elite tennis since the nineteenth century and that had driven many of the game's best players out of Grand Slam competition and into separate professional tours.

Facts

Founding Year

1877 1

Founding Date

1877-07-09 1

Frequency

Annual, held over two weeks each summer; cancelled only during the two World Wars and in 2020. 1

Host History

Played every year at the same venue, the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in Wimbledon, London, since 1877. Unlike the other three Grand Slam tournaments and the Olympic Games, it has never rotated among different host cities. 1

Classification

Scope

World or International 1

Frequency

Frequency (category)

Annual 1

Learn More

Whites, Strawberries and a Royal Box: Wimbledon's Guarded Traditions

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Few rules at Wimbledon are enforced as strictly as its dress code, which requires competitors to wear almost entirely white clothing on court, down to undergarments, a standard tournament officials have not hesitated to enforce even against top-ranked players sent back to the locker room to change. Strawberries and cream, sold by the tens of thousands of portions across the fortnight, have been served at the Championships since at least the 1880s and remain the tournament's best known culinary tradition. The Royal Box overlooking Centre Court carries its own protocol: spectators once bowed or curtsied to any member of the British royal family present, a custom the All England Club relaxed in 2003 to apply only when the reigning monarch or the Prince of Wales attends.

The tournament's grass courts, now the last Grand Slam surface of their kind, demand a groundskeeping regimen built around a specific ryegrass blend, mown to a precise height and re-seeded every year, that no other major tournament maintains. Wimbledon has also long resisted the visible court-side sponsor branding common at other majors, keeping its own courts comparatively bare of advertising as a matter of institutional preference. Even the tournament's calendar carried a fixed tradition until recently: the middle Sunday of the fortnight was kept as a rest day for decades, a practice the All England Club only abandoned as a fixed rule in 2022, moving to a full daily order of play throughout the Championships.

Last of the Four: Wimbledon, Equal Prize Money and the Weight of Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Wimbledon's reputation for guarding its traditions extended, for decades longer than its rivals, to how much it paid its own champions. The US Open became the first Grand Slam tournament to pay equal prize money to its men's and women's singles champions in 1973, the same year Billie Jean King's advocacy for equal pay reshaped professional tennis, and the French Open followed in 2006. Wimbledon held out the longest of the four, defending the gap for years partly on the grounds that men played best-of-five-set matches while women played best-of-three, a distinction critics noted was itself a format Wimbledon and the other majors had chosen to keep.

Pressure built publicly in the mid-2000s. Venus Williams, then a multiple Wimbledon champion, wrote an opinion piece in The Times in 2006 arguing directly against the All England Club's reasoning, and campaigners including the Women's Tennis Association pressed the case in the same period. The All England Club announced in February 2007 that it would pay equal prize money to its singles champions starting that year's Championships, finally closing the gap across all four majors. Venus Williams went on to win the 2007 title herself, becoming the first woman to collect a fully equal champion's purse at the tournament that had resisted the change longest.

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