Wimbledon diary: England managers, SUVs and Jack Draper's facial hair

The Guardian

4 days ago

That's not just the diary saying it. Meteorologists have also been at it. With the heat dropping from 33C on Tuesday afternoon to a positively respectable and comprehensible 22C on Wednesday morning, there was a sudden shift in both temperature and behaviour at the All England Club. For starters, shorts and T-shirts were out, replaced by an avalanche of linen suits. Queues at the water stations had dribbled away from 40 deep on Monday and Tuesday, according to one vendor, to nobody at all. Even at the Wimbledon pharmacy, the small concession that caters to your short-term health needs, there had been a shift in consumer habits. In the first 48 hours all anyone had wanted was sun cream, and there was a wall full of the stuff as proof. But come Wednesday normality had been restored, with the most popular product once again the blister pack of plasters for people wearing uncomfortable shoes.
Or at least Jack Draper is, the man-mountain British No 1 and adult human obliged to answer the question of what it's like to be the new Andy Murray every day. Draper was on the way to dispatching his first-round opponent, Sebastián Báez, with almost embarrassing ease on Tuesday before the Argentinian retired injured, but the home hope immediately walked into a more challenging encounter over how he styled his hair.
Draper has until recently been sporting a beard but, while he shaved it off for Wimbledon, he kept his tentative moustache intact, which led to 'abuse from pretty much everyone I've seen'. The 23-year-old has now pledged to get rid of it before his second-round match, but promised fans that he would remain grooming curious as he builds his career. 'One thing you will see with me over the years is a lot of different hairstyles, a lot of different things, because I'm very experimental with that sort of stuff,' he said. 'Do I get bored? Yeah. There will be a lot of different things. My brother doesn't like it but there will be a lot.'
This one is perhaps more subjective but the Diary and sources close to the Diary have been impressed with the collection turned out by Adidas for this year's Championships. Called 'London Originals' and riffing on the styles sported by Stan Smith and Billie Jean King in the 70s, this 36-piece collection is obviously described in the blurb as 'modern but timeless' but they're kind of right. Queen of the look is Britain's Sonay Kartal, who has been wearing the cropped 'Climacool polo shirt' with its fashionable boxy silhouette (think Billie Eilish with a backhand) but with some classic argyle patterning and little touches of Stan Smith green on the arms and logo, too. This touch of colour stays within Wimbledon's all-white rules, something King this week said she thought should be done away with. 'They shouldn't have the same uniforms on,' she told the Telegraph. 'I shouldn't have to look at anything [to tell me who's playing]. I should know. You can change tradition.'
Perhaps it's down to Glastonbury just finishing and there being a number of pop stars in the country with time on their hands, but the royal box could have staged its own mini-festival on Tuesday with all the musical talent in its cushioned rows. The Glasto headliner Olivia Rodrigo was there, alongside Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters, Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers and Tom Chaplin of Keane. With the rain passing early in the day, there was no need for Cliff Richard-style sing-alongs, which may have come as a relief to the crowd. You can only imagine the horror if Roy Hodgson and Thomas Tuchel – also guests on the day – had been tempted to join in.
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SUVs. Those big boxy vehicles with their dual exhausts are all over SW19, usually sitting in traffic on the approach to the grounds. They're also to be found at the Championships too, where Range Rover is an official partner and the British carmaker's vehicles ferry people about the place. A campaign group, the SUV Alliance, is arguing that this deal should be nixed, claiming that such vehicles pose a risk to pedestrians. They cite a study published in the BMJ's journal of injury prevention that claimed the risk of a child dying after being hit by an SUV was an astonishing 82% higher than if hit by a passenger car. Sorry to end on a downer, but that's the way of the world.
Additional reporting by Tumaini Carayol.