Time to bloom
While others seek out self-help books or podcasts, guidance and inspiration are more readily available for Marketa Vondrousova. If she’s going through a low or a trying period, the 2023 ladies' singles champion can just read what’s written on her skin.
Among all her other body art – she is surely one of Wimbledon’s most tattooed champions – are these words above her right elbow: “No rain, no flowers.”
In the heat and colour of tennis’ English garden, surrounded by the hydrangeas and petunias, that’s a different kind of flower power; the belief that you must go through hard times to have success.
This might just be a moment to wonder: is Vondrousova emerging from what has been
a long rainy season?
The Czech was the first unseeded player to win the ladies’ singles title at the All England Club. Unfortunately, she made some different history on her return last summer when she became the first defending champion for 30 years - since Steffi Graf in 1994 - to lose in the opening round.
Over the last couple of years, Vondrousova has missed a lot of tennis because of a shoulder injury. But this month, at a grass court tournament in Berlin, she won her first title since she became Wimbledon champion, with her run in Germany including victories over Madison Keys, Ons Jabeur and Aryna Sabalenka.
Vondrousova is unseeded again at Wimbledon, but that’s hardly going to stop her. She opens against the USA's McCartney Kessler.
Vondrousova vs Kessler is scheduled fourth match on Court 12
Facing Fabio
This might be hard for Carlos Alcaraz, born in 2003, to process but there are competitors in the gentlemen’s singles who started playing professional tennis before the launch of the iPhone (in 2007).
Alcaraz ready for 'flying' feeling on grass
Of the 128 men in the draw, three are 38 years old: Novak Djokovic, Gael Monfils and Fabio Fognini. That’s a very watchable trio.
Alcaraz’s two Wimbledon titles have come from beating Djokovic in the 2023 and 2024 finals and on Monday, as defending champion, the Spaniard opens Centre Court by playing another man from that generation, Fognini.
The Italian still has too much about him – all that fire and flair and unpredictability – to be thought of as an elder statesman.
Fognini vs Alcaraz is scheduled for 1.30pm on Centre Court
A rekindled relationship
Watching The Championships on television as a girl, Naomi Osaka adored the Wimbledon aesthetic and how her favourite players, such as Serena and Venus Williams, looked in their whites against the green backdrop.
As an adult, Osaka’s affection for playing on the lawns – and being out there herself in Wimbledon whites – hasn’t been so strong and so instant.
For all her success on hard courts (she has won the US Open and Australian Open twice each) the former world No.1 has never gone beyond the third round here.
This will be only her second appearance since 2019, and last summer she went out in the second round.
But it sounds as though Osaka is learning to enjoy playing on grass, with the Japanese saying at the weekend, before she meets Australia’s Talia Gibson, that she has “a better relationship with Wimbledon now”, helped by feeling more comfortable when moving on a surface that former player Andrea Petkovic calls “the meadow”.
Osaka vs Gibson is scheduled fourth match on Court 18
Leaving nothing to chance
“Oh, my god, this girl is so beautiful,” Aryna Sabalenka said of the woman she plays in the opening round, Carson Branstine, a Canadian qualifier and part-time model, having seen a video of her on social media.
On Saturday afternoon, that was all she knew about her opponent.
But, wanting to avoid any surprises, the world No.1 and her team won't have left it at that: they will have spent considerable time over the weekend studying Branstine’s matches and discussing strategies.
Make no mistake: Sabalenka is here to play
From warming up her toes before practice to video analysis, it’s all about the details with Sabalenka.
Sabalenka vs Branstine is scheduled for 1.00pm on No.1 Court
Foe's Fortnight?
Who came closest to beating Alcaraz on the Wimbledon grass last summer?
And who, if he can produce a similar level this year, might go deep into the Fortnight?
That would be Frances Tiafoe, the American who led Alcaraz by two sets to one when the friends met in the third round (interestingly, Alcaraz dropped the opening set in three of his seven matches, also doing so in his quarter-final with Tommy Paul and his semi-final with Daniil Medvedev).
For an early indication of what Tiafoe can do on a grass court this summer, watch him play Denmark’s Elmer Moller in the first round.
Moller vs Tiafoe is scheduled for 11.00am on Court 12