If the plans are approved, the Queen’s Club will stage a pre-Wimbledon tournament for women this year. This event will be the first time since a tournament of this nature has occurred since 1973.
This tournament will occur soon after the French Open 2024 in the mid-week leading up to the Wimbledon.
Although no final decision has been made, the LTA and The All England Club are keen to bring a WTA event back to London after more than half a century.
The pre-Wimbledon tournament will be an ideal opportunity for hundreds of fans with Wimbledon tickets to soak into the atmosphere before they head to the All England Lawn and Tennis Club for the main draw.
The WTA must, however, sanction the new tournament, which could start in 2025.
It is expected to replace Eastbourne as the sole WTA 500 event staged in the UK before Wimbledon.
Eastbourne will continue to be in its place before the Wimbledon but will downgraded to WTA 250 status. With this move, Eastbourne winners will now get fewer ranking points.
The idea stemmed from a year-long review of the grass-court season, which also looked at new ways of maximizing the impact of those summer weeks.
If all parties can be persuaded, the new schedule should appear in the 2025 WTA calendar, which is expected to be published in April.
Margaret Court, Chris Evert, and Ann Jones all won the women’s title at Queen’s before the event ended in 1973. Returning to Queen’s would boost the appreciation and publicity of the women’s game.
It will also attract more fans to the courts, with the limited Wimbledon tickets.
Attracting a field of appropriate quality may prove challenging, however, as many top players prefer to avoid entering a tournament the week after a Grand Slam, in this case, in anticipation of a deep run on Roland Garros’s clay courts.
It will be a tough turnaround time for the top-tier players to arrive at the Queens’ club, and injury concerns might be a possible indicator for the seeded players to think twice before entry.
Ticket prices must be significantly lower than the hefty sums associated with the men’s event. Considering the nature of the competition, Wimbledon tickets currently cost the most in the Grand Slams.
However, with the men’s stands going up and several commercial partners already supporting the ATP tournament, the LTA hopes this will also be an opportunity to increase revenue.
The courts at The Queen’s Club will be put under unprecedented strain, although research carried out for the LTA and the All England Club suggests a week of women’s matches causes less stress to grass than a similar load of men’s matches.
The women will get first use of the new courts, although some men may prefer the more challenging and less slippery courts they will inherit.
There will be fewer ranking points on offer than at the week’s other tournament in the German town of Bad Homburg, but many of those who do still want to play in the week before Wimbledon may prefer the shorter journey to The All England Club from the south coast of England.
Equal Status for Wheelchair Tennis at Wimbledon
Wimbledon will align with the other three Grand Slams by doubling the size of the wheelchair draws ahead of this summer’s championships.
Wimbledon has confirmed that it is doubling the size of the wheelchair draws for this summer’s Championships, aligning with the other three Grand Slam tournaments.
The men’s and women’s singles will feature 16 competitors instead of eight, while the doubles draws are increasing from four teams to eight.
Wimbledon resisted calls to increase its draw sizes like the other Grand Slams last year but has now complied with the Australian, French, and US Opens.
The quad draws remain unchanged at eight singles players and four doubles teams having doubled in size in 2022.
The wheelchair tournaments will begin a day earlier than before, on Tuesday, July 9, to allow the additional matches to be played.
Tokito Oda of Japan and Diede de Groot of the Netherlands are currently the reigning Wimbledon champions in the respective men’s and women’s wheelchair categories.
Great Britain’s Alfie Hewett and Gordon Reid are the men’s doubles champions, and De Groot and Jiske Griffioen are the women’s doubles champions.
The move means that more players will play the main draw, providing a larger talent pool for the wheelchair category.
Sam Schröder and Niels Vink are the current Wimbledon quad-doubles champions. With less than 100 days to go until the tournament’s start on July 1, the All England Club announced it had received a record number of applications for the public ticket ballot, with international demand particularly strong.
Stunning New Poster for 2024
This year’s Wimbledon poster will be a worthy addition if you collect tennis mementoes.
On Saturday, the All England Lawn and Tennis Club unveiled the official poster for the 2024 edition of The Championships in celebration of being 100 days out from the start date.
This time, the organizers have opted for a more natural design layout for the posters, embracing fauna.
Bringing together the event’s iconic trophies with the beautiful flora of the hallowed grounds, this mesmerizing creation by graphic designer Bella Grace celebrates the legacy of the grass-court tournament.
That’s just scratching the surface of the stunning visual, which organizers describe as “crafted using a unique approach to visual storytelling, with intricate details and hidden layers revealing themselves the longer the viewer observes the design.”
The image has 14 hidden elements within the two pieces of the Champions’ silverware. These include scorecards on the petals of hydrangeas and Rufus the Hawk.
The All England Lawn and Tennis Club announced that the demand for Wimbledon tickets has hit a staggering high, with a record number of ballots for this year’s tournament.
The number of ballot applications increased significantly in 2023, and there has been particularly strong international demand for tickets from the US, Spain and France to enjoy the Wimbledon Fortnight.
Official Wimbledon tickets are yet to be released.