Wimbledon diary: strawberry sandwiches, pricey rackets and Oliver Tarvet's expenses

The Guardian

16 hours ago

'Where are the strawberries and cream?' was among the more unexpected questions for one of Wimbledon's army of volunteer stewards as the crowd streamed through the gates on Monday morning, given that the answer is 'absolutely everywhere you look'. It was a different story, though, at the local branch of Marks & Spencer, where 300 packs of the chain's specially commissioned strawberry & crème sandwich, a staple food for influencers on Instagram and TikTok in recent days, ran out shortly after 9am. A sample did make it into the media room, however, and while strawberries 'paired with whipped cream cheese on sweetened bread' might sound like the losing team's product idea on week two of The Apprentice, it has to be said … it's very edible.
There was an air of genteel bedlam in the main Wimbledon shop as the first wave of merch-hungry tennis fans poured through the doors in search of SW19-branded booty. The demand for hats and towels was, not surprisingly, rather stronger than that for sweatshirts and hoodies, and no one at all seemed inclined to lug around one of the giant tennis rackets – designed to be hung on the wall, apparently – that are the most expensive single items in the shop at £600 a pop. And why would you, when you can get a self-inflating cushion – a genuine masterpiece of cutting-edge design that does exactly what it promises to do – for £582 less?
Wimbledon's post-match media conferences can tend towards the formulaic – in the post-Nick Kyrgios era, at any rate – but there was an unusual twist in Oliver Tarvet's debrief after his excellent opening-day win against Leandro Riedi, as a 30-second chat about the match itself gave way to an in-depth discussion of the US collegiate system's rule limiting an athlete's annual earnings to $10,000 (£7,300). Tarvet, who is at San Diego University, is guaranteed at least £99,000 for reaching the second round and will now aim to spend as much of it as possible to get below the limit. 'I will try and do everything I can to make that work out and to find X amount of expenses so I'm under $10,000 of profit,' he said. 'I've got to find £60k, £70k of expenses. Tennis is an expensive sport so, hopefully I can make that happen. Just pay my coaches a little bit extra, I don't know. We'll figure something out. Fly business class. No, I keep humble, but yeah, really try to make that happen.'
One of the more persistent – if understandable – annual breaches of Wimbledon protocol appears to have been consigned to history (along with the line judges) at this year's tournament: the running-while-looking-like-you're-not dash from gate three to the kiosk selling returns from the show courts as soon as the gates open at 10am. The simple solution – so simple that you can only wonder why it did not happen years ago – was to move the kiosk from its old spot by the Garden Café, on the far boundary of the site, to a new location … right next to gate three. 'We had to get lots of stewards in to try to get people to stop running,' an official mused while watching the new system working flawlessly on Monday. 'It wasn't very Wimbledon.'
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Tennis-goers at Wimbledon are used to spending a fair part of their day looking nervously skywards but, for one day at least, players and punters alike were hoping for a cloud or two to offer some blessed respite from the 30C heat. Keeping cool was a constant challenge and one to which Daniil Medvedev, the No 9 seed, epically failed to rise. His rackets paid a heavy price for his surprise defeat by Benjamin Bonzi, as Medvedev took out his rage on both his chair and his bag, though he was more philosophical in the media room. 'Physically, it was not easy,' he said. 'To make a winner against him today, I had to make like, three great shots in the corner. I will never say he won because of the heat, but the heat is not easy to play. I do think, if you ask him, probably he was not enjoying the heat either.'