Amid the opening-day downpours of Wimbledon in 1922, “diehard old-timers” declared that the “wrath of heavens” had unleashed itself upon the Championships. They blamed the sin of ambition: the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, responding to the superstar status of French postwar phenomenon Suzanne Lenglen, had just relocated to new, larger grounds.
“Our hearts were as leaden as the skies,” backroom staff member Norah Gordon Cleather, later the acting club secretary, wrote of that rain-thwarted first day.
Walk into Wimbledon today and heaven’s wrath will be well hidden. The site in the SW19 postcode of London is a purple-hued playground with textures far lovelier than can be captured by television. Even when it rains and those squads of highly trained teenagers pull the covers over the courts with military speed, there’s an aura and a bloom. This is a place to prioritise pleasure.
In New York, at the sweltering fourth Grand Slam tournament of the year, the mood can turn darker.
“You cannot imagine,” said Daniil Medvedev, the Russian former number one, as he towelled off his hands and face during a 2023 quarter-final he played and won in the oppressive humidity and 33 degrees heat of Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Looking straight down the lens of the TV camera next to his towel box, the 2021 US Open champion then flatly stated: “One player is gonna die, and they’re gonna see.”
Medvedev is drama prone, but his soliloquy haunts me. I would prefer it if tennis players didn’t die for my entertainment. If you watch the sport long enough, you already know how these elite athletes can fall dizzy and faint in the brutal conditions in which they ply their trade.
As they dig deeper and push harder to win, heat stress can defeat them, dehydration hospitalise them. Their footwork falters, their shots spray wide. When they say they “left it all out there on the court”, what this sometimes means is they vomited into a courtside bin.
Climate shaped tennis in its infancy. The crushed brick of the red clay at the French Open, or Roland-Garros, originated as an 1880s solution to the problem of scorched grass. After newly laid lawn tennis courts at a Cannes hotel were burnt by intense Riviera sun, powdered terracotta was applied to make them playable and more pleasing to the eye. Clay courts soon flourished wherever grass could not survive, the sport going global with the aid of pulverised ceramics.
When the wind picks up, the surface attacks the players, its fine dust getting in their eyes and occasionally unravelling them. Still, the harshness of rogue clay has got nothing on the inhospitable hard courts of Melbourne in January 2020. Here any lingering image of tennis as a game of elegance and glamour was snuffed out by the apocalyptic feel of a city blanketed by bushfire smoke.
During one Australian Open qualifying match, Slovenian player Dalila Jakupovic suffered a coughing fit, collapsed to her knees and retired from a winning position, saying afterwards that she had been scared. The match had been delayed by the haze for a single hour. That same day, people in Melbourne had been advised to stay indoors.
These stark scenes seem a long way from the genteel, temperate-climate traditions found at Wimbledon and drawn upon by the All England Club to convincing effect.
For this year’s beautiful official poster, titled Tennis in an English Garden, graphic designer Sarah Madden has imagined the stands as a flower bed, with spectators sitting among hydrangeas, petunias, butterflies and bees as they admire a player exhibiting Lenglenesque grace. The royal box is populated only by flowers.
There’s no sweat on display, no geopolitics, no confrontation, only serene greenery and the alluring ballet of tennis. When the All England Club says the poster highlights “Wimbledon’s distinctive blend of sport and nature”, it doesn’t sound like promotional hyperbole but the entire, 19th century-born point.
Over the fortnight, the grass starts to die. The baselines go brown – in dry years, they will appear extra-scuffed. But this living surface is managed all year round by grounds staff accustomed to factoring weather variables into the science of court maintenance. They are adept at producing what Cleather, in her 1947-published memoir Wimbledon Story, called “the velvet lawn”.
When you’re there, even on finals weekend, any wear-and-tear seems trifling. Instead, everything from the Boston Ivy that clads the exterior of Centre Court to the retractable roofs above the two main show courts conveys a sense of human mastery over the elements. The skill of the players nestles within feats of technology, engineering and horticulture.
Sport, the epitome of our pursuit of excellence and a release valve for so many, must adapt fast to this global heating, parching, melting, and that means being prepared to change the rules
Such ingenuity is embedded in its history: the creation of lawn tennis in the 1870s was only possible thanks to the invention more than 40 years earlier of the mechanical lawn mower. And yet the advent or spread of an array of sports still thriving today – soccer, golf, cricket, tennis – is more usually situated in the context of the late 19th-century surge in leisure time, a byproduct of industrialisation, almost as if the advances of the industrial revolution itself are too prosaic to dwell upon.
Now the realities of climate change – a process set in motion in the century in which so many games were codified and popularised – has made sport vulnerable to visible disruption and material risk.
It was a snowless December 2015 working for a ski company in the French Alps that got Madeleine Orr thinking it couldn’t “just be skiing”. Now a sport ecologist, the Canadian academic learned from experience that when a mountain can’t “open” because the snow gods have their own schedule, injuries follow. Skiers are funnelled on to runs with artificial snow, increasing the rate of collision, then the eventual arrival of heavy snow provokes overexcitement.
Orr’s own venture off-piste ended with multiple knee surgeries, she writes in Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sport (2024), which explores how sport has become a victim of climate change, even as it is complicit in it.
For evidence of sport’s contribution to global warming, look no further than the “climate crisis, what climate crisis?” approach exemplified by Fifa, the world football governing body, which has seemingly never encountered a stadium construction proposal it didn’t like.
[ Dangerous heat is a real threat for the 2026 World Cup. Are teams ready?Opens in new window ]
Such casually immense carbon footprints rebound on the sport they are intended to benefit. The body keeps the score in the form of heat cramps, heat exhaustion and heat stroke. When world players’ union Fifpro criticises Fifa for not implementing cooling-break and match abandonment policies to the extent it says is necessary, the words of a wilting Medvedev loom large: “One player is gonna die, and they’re gonna see.”
Tennis authorities have their own extreme-heat rules and heat-stress scales – in Australia, these have had to be continually re-evaluated, which tells its own story. Climate fears also enter the court in another way, with players now more often finding themselves sharing a workspace with activists equipped with dire warnings and glue.
Wimbledon does not escape. In 2023, Just Stop Oil campaigners protesting the All England Club’s partnership deal with fossil-fuel financiers Barclays scattered jigsaw pieces and confetti on the grass. After this, the Wimbledon shop stopped selling jigsaws. A plan to expand the site into an adjacent golf course has also attracted some local ire, with one sign reading “love tennis, hate concrete” – a perhaps unresolvable inner conflict in the age of mass sport.
Before my first visit to Wimbledon in 2022, its rose arbour, ball-shaped topiary and pristine quilt of courts were just BBC backdrops. I thought it was the hot mess of Grand Slam tennis I was seeking: the gladiatorial competition, the chasing down of lost causes, the agony of match points squandered, the audacity of drop shots, the no-look handshakes, the last gasps of glory in injury-stalled careers.
As a television viewer, it is the juxtapositions that compel. All sports hinge on rules, precision and fairness, but because tennis is more than averagely wrapped up in etiquette inherited from the Victorian leisure class, emotions and bodily functions that would be unremarkable in other sports can seem incongruous on its hallowed courts.
Order and chaos have a habit of colliding, nevertheless. Other species, for instance, seem to love nothing more than rocking up to remind humans they can’t control everything. Snakes, bees, cats and various birds have all been known to interrupt play. At Wimbledon, players have had to swat away flying ants with their rackets – the sight of Danish former number one Caroline Wozniacki shaking her personal swarm out of her plait in 2018 was one “distinctive blend of sport and nature”.
[ Everywhere you look in the world of sport now climate change is bitingOpens in new window ]
Billie Jean King, the legendary champion and equality trailblazer, once defined tennis as the “perfect combination of violent action taking place in an atmosphere of total tranquillity”. It’s an old quote and I wonder if it’s still true.
When I watch, from home, a rally played during an earthquake (in Acapulco), a server rattled by the sonic boom of a fighter jet (in Paris) or those handshake-free matches between opponents whose countries are at war, tennis doesn’t seem tranquil.
But when I’m a fan-flapping spectator, tranquillity – the civilisation of it all – turns out to be what I value and aspire to most. Last summer a friend messaged me to say he had spent a sunny day at a cricket match somewhere in Dublin. This was as much a surprise to him as it was to me. I replied that when I was a child I used to think the old guys who sat watching test cricket for five days were mad. Now I envy them.
At Wimbledon, I’ve found that the best part of the day can be the evening, after the crowd has thinned. I can spread out on shaded seats, drink red wine from recyclable plasticware and absorb a second-round meeting between, say, Petra Kvitová and Jasmine Paolini. The London heat rises up Centre Court, making me sleepier than the wine alone could manage, and my lower back relaxes so much, I realise how rarely it ever does.
Tennis days are long. Matches are regularly paused because spectators, overestimating their capacity to withstand heat, require medical assistance. Buying tickets for outdoor tournaments in Italy or France, I study online seat maps closely as I try to work out the aspect of arenas, the quantity of sunshine I covet and the amount of exposure I will be able to take before I reach, in tennis parlance, break point.
Heat, even in climates where it is expected, can feel ominous. Everyone wants to see exceptional play, or what commentators call “tennis from another planet”. No one wants to see tennis from a burning planet.
Back at sustainability-championing Wimbledon, it is still hard to conceive of the wrath of heavens as something dry, cloudless and stealthily deadening, even as climate scientists forecast more extreme and prolonged heatwaves for our future summers.
But sooner or later, players, spectators and courts alike will be baked in ways that would never have been predicted when the first Championships was held in 1877. Sport, the epitome of our pursuit of excellence and a release valve for so many, must adapt fast to this global heating, parching, melting, and that means being prepared to change the rules.
“It gets late early,” is an old saying of baseball catcher Yogi Berra, or “Yogi-ism”, sometimes cited during best-of-three-set tennis matches that whizz by too quickly for the losing player to mount a comeback. In the climate emergency it gets late early, too. Some unforced errors, as players know, cost you the match.
