3 Wimbledon stories told through data
By: Oliver Carrington
Tags: Wimbledon, Tennis, Sports, Data Science, Data Visualization

3 Wimbledon stories told through data

We created an interactive data viz tool to compare tennis success by country

Statistics from the Grand Slam tennis competitions give ammo to no end of data stories. From looking at the success of nations over time; the differences between the men’s and women’s game; to comparisons between the four different competitions.

We created this tool to make it easier to get our teeth into the mass of data available on the Grand Slams — just in time for Wimbledon.

First, how to use our tool ‘Grand Slam Stats’

Follow the Grand Slam Stats link here: https://jpvsilva88.github.io/tennis/

It’s simple to create your own chart to explore the data. Follow the link above and then pick from this range of options:

women’s or men’s tennis;

the four Grand Slam tournaments;

from up to five countries at a time; and

the initial round of 128 participants to the annual winners of the competition

Your selections will then show up as a handy summary above the chart that you just created.

For inspiration, here are three Wimbledon stories that we found when exploring the tool. So get some strawberries and cream and read on.

France now has more male Wimbledon competitors than UK

A role reversal between neighbours

The UK (in orange above) has long had its biggest presence at its home Grand Slam with a high number of men participating in the opening round of 128. Hosts are helped in part by the number of wildcards that the home nation are permitted to give to players who don't have direct entry to the tournament. Throughout the 70s and 80s, UK often had more than twice the number of Frenchmen (in blue) even when its numbers were declining.

But in 1991, France overtook UK for the first time. Since then France has only dipped below the UK five times and never since 2000 as new generations of French players join the game, such as Gaël Monfils in 2003 and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in 2007.

Numbers of female US competitors are starting to recover from their Wimbledon decline

The William sisters’ success hides America’s steep decline in numbers

The chart above focuses on the women that make it past the first round. For many years, this stage was clearly dominated by the sheer numbers of US players (in blue). Despite Serena Williams, followed by Venus, winning the most Wimbledon titles in the 2000s and early 2010s, this hides the story that the overall numbers of US women completely crashed in this period. In 2013, the US was overtaken by the Czech Republic (orange) which had the most women players at the round of 64 for that year.

This trend is not just at Wimbledon, but across all Grand Slam competitions and the US men’s game too. But unlike the men, US women players are starting to see a resurgence in numbers in the past few years. So maybe this is just a blip and America should not worry too much about a future without the Williams sisters?

Where have all the high performing Russian women gone this year?

Russian women are no longer filling the Wimbledon gap that was left by the Americans

In the 2000s when numbers of US women were in decline, post-Soviet Russia (orange) started to fill this gap at Wimbledon. As mentioned in the second chart, Russia overtook the US and was the top performing nation for some time — with nine women reaching the third round of 32 in 2008. But since their peak in the late 2000s, numbers have reduced.

Despite starting with 11 women at Wimbledon this year, this is the first time since 1995 that Russia has had no women in the round of 32. In contrast, this is the first time that China (blue) has had more success than the Russians at this stage with Shuai Zhang and Qiang Wang making it to the round of 32.

Find your own trends: https://jpvsilva88.github.io/tennis/

How we created our data viz?

My partner Joao, a big tennis fan, did all the heavy lifting to create this tool. The data can be found on Jeff Sackmann’s handy GitHub account. React was used to crunch the data and design the tool, using the beautiful recharts as a chart library. It is hosted on GitHub and we add new Wimbledon results manually as they happen.