What we learned
Wimbledon produced two familiar winners but also saw new faces break into the big time. We look back on the 2014 Championships
Tuesday 8 July 2014 20:44, UK
There was a sense of deja vu on the final weekend of Wimbledon when Petra Kvitova and Novak Djokovic secured their second Wimbledon titles.
They had both claimed their first crowns in 2011 – the most successful season of both players’ careers – and three years later history repeated itself at the All England Club.
The successes of Kvitova and Djokovic may have been a return to the past but this year's Wimbledon also gave us a glimpse into the future. Here we take a look at what the tournament revealed about the sport's main protagonists...
Pre-season predictions about Djokovic were correct
Djokovic’s victory at the All England Club took him back to the top of the world rankings, confirming what many had envisaged at the start of this year. The Serbian’s strong finish to the 2013 campaign, combined with Rafael Nadal’s habit of following an incredibly successful season with a relatively disappointing one, had marked him out as a heavy favourite to finish 2014 as the world No 1. If Djokovic does hold onto top spot for the next five months, it will be the third time in four years he has ended the year in first position.
Djokovic’s results in recent years have edged him ahead of the rest of the ‘Big Four’ and, after reaching his 12th grand slam final in his last 16 attempts, he must surely be recognised as the most consistently brilliant player of the current era of men’s tennis. With ‘only’ seven major titles to his name as opposed to Roger Federer’s 17 and Nadal’s 14 there is a tendency to compare him unfavourably to the Swiss maestro and the Spanish superstar, but Djokovic is likely to go down in history as one of the very best players of all time.
In the Open Era only Bjorn Borg, Ivan Lendl, Nadal and Federer have shown comparable consistency across the grand slams over a similar period of time and the way Djokovic slides on hard- and grass-courts could yet revolutionise the defensive side of the game. A second Wimbledon title just adds to the legacy.
Kvitova can be the world’s best
When Petra Kvitova first won the Wimbledon title in 2011 it started a run of form which almost ended with the Czech clinching the world No 1 spot. Her defeat of Maria Sharapova in the final three years ago was a surprise, but she backed it up by winning the end-of-season WTA Tour Championships and reaching the semi-finals of the Australian Open and French Open in 2012. At that time Kvitova had just turned 22 and seemed to possess all the attributes needed to battle fellow up-and-comer Victoria Azarenka for supremacy in the women’s game during the following years.
But the last 24 months have generally been a case of unfulfilled potential for the hard-hitting left-hander, who has mixed wins at prestigious Premier Mandatory events in Montreal and Tokyo with early exits at grand slams. Before this year’s Wimbledon she had failed to reach the quarter-finals at six of the last seven majors and was threatening to slip into mediocrity. But in London she gave a timely reminder of her immense talent by easing her way through the draw bar one scare against Venus Williams.
Kvitova is the youngest of the seven multiple grand slam winners currently active in the women’s game and is now perfectly placed for another assault on that world No 1 spot she missed out on in the aftermath of her first Wimbledon victory.
