Expect a better showing from the Britons at this year’s Wimbledon
Katie Boulter is one of the best British hopes for Wimbledon - Getty Images/Glyn Kirk
Quiz question: who were the last Britons standing, male and female, at last year’s Wimbledon?
A thumbs up if you guessed Katie Boulter, and a standing ovation for remembering Liam Broady, now the world No 146, who eliminated fourth seed Casper Ruud on Centre Court.
Unfortunately, both parties went no further than the third round, making 2023 the first Championships in five years to feature no home interest in the second week.
Can we do better this year? The omens are encouraging. The two British No1s of the moment – Jack Draper and Katie Boulter – both landed titles in the build-up, and have earned seedings that should protect them from a disastrous first-round draw.
Meanwhile Emma Raducanu registered her maiden top-ten win when she eliminated Jessica Pegula from Eastbourne.
Interestingly, there is also a tipping point approaching. For the first time since the late 1970s – the era when Virginia Wade and Sue Barker were both competing for major titles – British tennis is beginning to draw greater rewards from the women’s game than the men’s.
If you look at our graph, you can see the gradual convergence of two lines, marking victories per season on the ATP and WTA tours since the turn of the Century.
During the Noughties, the British women were barely registering half-a-dozen wins between them per season – a dismal state of affairs that only really picked up with Johanna Konta’s US Open breakthrough in 2015.
The lines have drawn together more closely since 2017, the point at which Andy Murray ceased to dominate the British tennis scene. But it is only in the last few months that the women have moved into the lead, based largely on the returns of Boulter, Raducanu and Harriet Dart.
This is surely as it should be, because any athletic girl ought to see tennis as a smart option, offering the best career prospects of any sport. Whereas it’s tougher to drag the sportiest boys away from the behemoth that is football.
Harriet Dart was beaten by Canadian Leylah Fernandez in the quarter-final at Eastbourne - Getty Images/Glyn Kirk
Similar economic incentives have tilted the gender balance of American tennis, where five different women have claimed 29 major titles since the last male grand-slam champion (Andy Roddick at the 2021 US Open). In the USA, the rewards from the big franchise sports are so eye-watering that talented boys have to be very single-minded if they are to resist the gravitational pull of the NFL, NBA and MLB.
If it has taken longer for the same pattern to emerge on this side of the Atlantic, that’s probably because our most athletic young women prefer collegiate sports like hockey and netball. Despite its many rewards, tennis can be lonely, expensive and stressful. Until recently, there haven’t been enough girls going into the system to mitigate a high teenage drop-out rate.
Happily, we are seeing signs of improvement at last. Both in the nine British woman ranked in the world’s top 300 – a modest tally, perhaps, but a rising one – and in a strong junior cohort. On Thursday, 15-year-old Hannah Klugman narrowly failed to qualify for the senior event and Wimbledon, while Mingge Xu and Mika Stojsavljevic are also developing fast.
Female participation figures are a daily preoccupation for Jo-Anne Downing, a programme strategy manager for the Lawn Tennis Association. “Before a girl steps onto a tennis court,” Downing told Telegraph Sport. “she has already been bombarded by gender stereotypes and societal pressures. From a young age, boys are learning to be brave and confident and sporty while girls are learning to be kind and helpful and chatty and quiet.”
To shake up these hoary old stereotypes, positive role models are invaluable. With her 2.4m Instagram followers, Raducanu makes for a particularly aspirational figure. And in fact her lightning-strike victory in the 2021 US Open has helped shape the pathway for young girls in a very specific way.
You may remember that Prime Video – who then held the rights to the US Open – made that 2021 US Open final available free-to-air via Channel Four. They received a seven-figure sum in return, which they reinvested in a nationwide coaching programme.
On the ground, girls aged between four and 16 have had a free package that consists of six lessons, a free racket and a T-shirt. The idea is not only to expose them to tennis at an early age, but to educate coaches as well.
“Participation-wise, tennis is one of the most gender-balanced sports for kids,” Downing says, outlining the domino sequence behind the male-dominated results of the last four decades. “The challenge for us is that that doesn’t translate into competition, which skews more heavily towards boys. If girls don’t stay in competition, they don’t end up as part of our workforce. And if the coaching workforce is skewed towards males, there are fewer female role models.
“With the Prime Video programme, we’ve got 500 coaches who’ve had bespoke training and we’re trying to bust that myth that girls don’t like competing. They do – but it just has to be introduced more gradually because of all that social conditioning we spoke about earlier. We’ve had some great successes, but it’s largely about the individual coaches and how passionate they are about the cause.
“Wouldn’t it be great if every coach across the country was running girl-only sessions, and venues were aware of how to keep girls in the system? That’s utopia, and we’re a little bit away from that at the moment. But the whole programme has been a learning experience for everyone, and it’s great to have that legacy from Emma’s win.”
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