The Pimms is poised, the strawberries are ripening and the whites are being starched. Wimbledon, the oldest tennis tournament in the world, will soon be back at SW19 and live from our living rooms.
STRI has a long history with the annual lawn tennis tournament, providing consultancy and research services to the AELTC in excess of 50 years. This will be our 26th year undertaking Championship surveys, which will include daily measurements for surface hardness, volumetric moisture content, relative ball rebound, and live grass cover. A team of STRI researchers, led by Mark Ferguson, will decamp from their Yorkshire base to analyse playing surface characteristics throughout the tournament.
Take a look at our Championship galleries below to find out what Mark and the team will be getting up to.
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- Relative live grass cover taken with a chlorophyll meter and with NDVI
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- Live grass cover readings, measured visually with a point quadrat
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- Surface moisture readings, measured with a Delta-T Theta probe
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- Relative ball rebound, calculated by dropping a ball from 100 inches onto court surfaces
Top facts from last year’s Championships
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- We took 1872 ball bounce measurements
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- We took 7416 clegg measurements for surface hardness
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- We counted 31’200 blades of grass
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- There were 51 million Perennial Ryegrass plants on Centre Court
Top Wimbledon facts
- Centre Court and Court 1 are taken out of play at the end of The Championships. They are only ever used for The Championships, players must earn the right to play on these prestigious courts
- Court grass composed of 100% Perennial Ryegrass
- Championships playing height is 8mm
- 54,250 tennis balls were used in the Championships
- 290,000 tennis balls to fill Centre court
- 25,000 bottles of Champagne drunk
- 142,000 portions of strawberries and cream
