Draper on collision course with Djokovic & Sinner in Wimbledon draw
But from there things are set to get significantly tougher with former finalist Marin Cilic a likely second-round opponent and Alexander Bublik, the player he lost to in the fourth round of the French Open and who won the big grass-court warm-up event in Halle last weekend, his first scheduled seeded rival in the third round.
Eight-time champion Novak Djokovic, who has made the final in every edition since 2017, could be waiting in the quarter-finals, with world number one Jannik Sinner in the semi-finals.
Two-time defending champion Carlos Alcaraz is in the bottom half of the draw and will open the tournament on Centre Court on Monday against veteran Italian Fabio Fognini.
Emma Raducanu will take on 17-year-old wild card Mimi Xu, one of three home teenage debutants, in an eye-catching opening round.
The former US Open champion reached the fourth round last year but faces an uphill battle to do so again, with top seed Aryna Sabalenka and former Wimbledon champion Marketa Vondrousova both in her section.
✨ The opening round draw for the Brits at @Wimbledon in full:
Jack Draper vs Sebastian BaezJacob Fearnley vs Joao FonsecaCam Norrie vs Roberto Bautista AgutBilly Harris vs Hubert HurkaczDan Evans vs Jay ClarkeJack Pinnington Jones vs Tomás Martín EtcheverryHenry Searle… https://t.co/YRcj2MgeiU
— LTA (@the_LTA) June 27, 2025
It was a nightmare draw for the leading British women, with Katie Boulter – unseeded this year – taking on top-10 star Paula Badosa, while British number three Sonay Kartal faces 20th seed Jelena Ostapenko.
Sixteen-year-olds Hannah Klugman and Mika Stojsavljevic also drew seeds, with the former facing former US Open finalist Leylah Fernandez and Stojsavljevic meeting Ashlyn Krueger.
The bottom quarter of the women's event could throw up some big-hitting contests in the second week with Iga Swiatek potentially facing a fourth-round clash against former champion Elena Rybakina and a quarter-final with second seed Coco Gauff, having dropped to eighth in the rankings.
Defending champion Barbora Krejcikova, meanwhile, will take on exciting Filipino teenager Alexandra Eala in the opening round, provided the Czech recovers from a leg injury in time.
Mimi Xu will face Emma Raducanu (Bradley Collyer/PA)
There is also an all-British contest in the first round of the men's draw, with veteran Dan Evans facing fellow wild card Jay Clarke.
The winner of that is likely to get a shot at Djokovic while 21-year-old Oliver Tarvet, who came through qualifying to make it 23 British players in the main singles draws, has the carrot of a second-round meeting with Alcaraz if he can beat Leandro Riedi.
British number two Jacob Fearnley will try to get a first win against hot Brazilian prospect Joao Fonseca while Cameron Norrie takes on veteran Roberto Bautista Agut, who performed strongly at Queen's Club.
Hull's Johannus Monday was given the toughest draw of the British debutants on the men's side against 13th seed Tommy Paul, while Jack Pinnington Jones will take on Argentina's Tomas Etcheverry and Oliver Crawford faces Mattia Bellucci of Italy.
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Western Force v British Lions Live: Kick-off time, TV channel and score updates
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Telegraph
an hour ago
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Inside Roger Federer Inc – where business never stops booming
Inside the 1886 Club, a ritzy pop-up cabin on the banks of the Savannah River in Augusta, Roger Federer was holding forth for Mercedes-Benz private clients hand-picked to savour a 'once-in-a-lifetime' Masters experience. While this year marked his first visit to Georgia, he felt instantly at home, with both the man and the setting symbolising an aesthetic universally admired and yet impossibly out of reach. He sauntered on stage for an obligatory interview about his career, but what mattered most to the audience was that he had turned up in the first place. Such is life in his rarefied air: a realm where, beyond the niceties, all anybody wants to do is bask in his glory. Even two and a half years into retirement, Federer exerts the same effect wherever he goes. Crowds do not swoon over him at a Coldplay concert in Zurich because of his talents on percussion, or go giddy at the 24 Hours of Le Mans over his dexterity with the ceremonial flag. They acclaim him purely as the ultimate sophisticate. It promises to be the same at Wimbledon over the next fortnight: Federer will be there, the All England Club confirms, but for the third straight summer not to coach or to commentate, merely to grace the place with his presence. When you are a personal friend of the Princess of Wales, the club's patron, and when you can reduce Centre Court to raptures just by arriving in the royal box in a beige suit and polka-dotted tie, who needs to work for a living? It is this strange alchemy on which a suite of luxury sponsors have leapt, transforming the most stylish player of his age, indeed any age, into the embodiment of opulent allure. Just as Anna Wintour, Vogue 's departing queen bee and a self-confessed Federer groupie, demands that he sit next to her at catwalks, so Mercedes supply him with their latest supercar every six months, calculating that the very sight of him at the wheel will provide that extra assurance of quality. Except it is not just a product he is selling, but an entire way of being. His vast endorsement portfolio – spanning everything from Rolex watches to Lindt chocolate, Sunrise mobile networks to Jura coffee machines – stands as testament to his ineffable Swissness. Even the country's department of foreign affairs describes how Federer's ambassadorial virtues are rooted in an image of 'grace and refined excellence'. What makes him unassailable as a brand magnet, though, is his astounding longevity. By the time his 10-year contract with Uniqlo, the Japanese clothing giant, expires in 2028, he will have been out of the game for over half the deal's duration. This was a problem for Nike, his backers for two decades, who believed that he retained his value only for as long as he actively competed. By contrast, Tadashi Yanai, Uniqlo's founder, envisaged his seamless evolution from eight-time Wimbledon champion to middle-aged mannequin. And he was prepared to reward him as such, to the tune of £22 million a year. It is an agelessness inconceivable with any other icon. In 2019, the year Federer reached the last of his 10 Wimbledon finals, he recorded annual earnings of £68 million, with 92 per cent of that amount derived from his commercial tie-ups. Nobody else on the global sporting rich list – not Lionel Messi, not Cristiano Ronaldo – could hold a candle to this proportion. LeBron James was the closest, on 59 per cent. As a gentleman of extravagant leisure, Federer's status as king of the billboards has become only more bulletproof. In 2023, he collected £81 million despite having hung up his racket the previous year. The pattern is paradoxical: at the same time as Federer claims to feel ever further removed from his feats on court, the world's most prestigious labels can hardly wait to renew their associations with him. Central to this phenomenon is the fact that he remains untouched by scandal. While Tiger Woods, the one athlete who could once rival him for corporate pulling power, was torpedoed in 2009 by revelations of serial infidelity, Federer has endured as the safest of bets, with no lurid entanglements and no skeletons lurking in the closet. He and his wife Mirka, a Slovak-born former player briefly mentored by Martina Navratilova, have been inseparable since they shared their first kiss on the final day of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Even the symmetrical make-up of their family, with two sets of twins – the girls, Myla and Charlene, were born in 2009, with boys Leo and Lenny arriving five years later – resembles a work of precision engineering. There is such a premium on putting Federer's face to anything that he has amassed £29 million simply for promoting Barilla pasta. His apparent absence of any culinary credentials was no impediment to him signing on the dotted line, earnestly announcing in 2017: 'Pasta has been a part of my daily life for so many years that this partnership was a natural.' The most eye-catching expression of this alliance came when, after Italy's lifting of its most severe lockdown restrictions in 2020, he travelled to a small Ligurian town to engage two girls in a socially-distanced game of rooftop tennis. Although it made for a sweet advert, it still seemed miraculous he was banking an eight-figure sum for this. As Andy Roddick told Federer's biographer, Christopher Clarey: 'The thing I'm most jealous of is not the skill and not the titles – it's the ease of operation with which Roger exists.' Federer's smooth adaptation to alien environments was on full display last year at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, the smallest of America's Ivy League universities, as he gave the graduation speech. 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Today, the vast industry of Roger Federer Inc. continues to thrive, peddling the seductive myth that you too can be like Roger, eating the same exquisite confectionery and sipping the same Moët champagne. Just as he did with his single-handed backhand, an art exhibit in itself, he is curating a style built on an elusive ideal. To study him up close is to see how assiduously he maintains his own mystique, treating his thousandth sponsor meet-and-greet as if it is his first. In Augusta, he patiently made each of Mercedes' top-tier clients feel like the most important person in the room. You wonder, however, if this life of schmoozing the high-rollers can sustain him indefinitely. Is it making him, dare one say it, a little listless? There was a suspicion of this at the Masters when, tiring of being asked about the verdant fairways, he said: 'Enough already with the golf. 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The issue is that the demand to see him don his tennis whites again, even at almost 44, is off the charts. When he embarked on an express circuit of Latin America in 2019, he banked £7.7 million in six days, packing out stadiums from Santiago to Quito, Mexico City to Buenos Aires, with the fervour around his Argentina date compelling Diego Maradona to tell him: 'You were, you are, and will always be the greatest. There is no other like you.' All this was accomplished without Nadal, his perfect foil, across the net. As soon as they joined forces in Cape Town in 2020, in aid of Federer's foundation, the occasion drew over 51,000 people, the largest attendance ever recorded for a tennis match. You can imagine the rock-star reception they would attract if they decide, as men of independent means, to head out on the road for a reunion tour. This is why the idea holds such appeal for Federer, who, for all his sincere efforts at humility, has an acute appreciation of his worth. The grandeur of his entrances at Wimbledon in 2009, when he would peel off a multi-pocketed military jacket to reveal a diamond-white waistcoat with a golden Nike swoosh, still constitutes perhaps the most ostentatious flex in sport. The Laver Cup, which he conceived both as a tribute to past legends and as tennis's answer to the Ryder Cup with its 'Europe versus World' dynamic, could hardly be called an exercise in understatement either. The lavish spectacle, with non-playing team members watching courtside on leather banquettes, smacks of a giant 'RF' trade fair, with fan zones dedicated exclusively to approved sponsors hawking Federer's cars, Federer's clothes, Federer's sunglasses. Even the deckchairs were emblazoned with Swiss marketing. Federer has been desperate to imbue the event with passion and sporting significance, to the point of once instructing Alexander Zverev, in full view of the cameras: 'I want a fist pump or a 'let's go', every f------ point you win. And every point you lose, you f------ take it.' The irony was that he had never acted this way in team sport before, even when flying the flag for Switzerland at the Davis Cup. It illustrated the hollowness of the enterprise, with Federer trying to make a spectacle that essentially meant nothing look as if it meant everything. It is the fundamental problem with the Laver Cup, as it rolls on to San Francisco in September: that for its pretensions to be sport of substance, it serves little purpose beyond burnishing Federer's cult of personality. The pity is that he still resists any shift into television commentary, where he could offer a degree of technical expertise unparalleled in the booth. He has admitted that he did consider it, only shelving the plan when he realised how critical he would have to be of the players. Perhaps his most impulsive move was to decide, six years ago, to invest in a then little-known Swiss footwear company called On, whose creators first experimented by crafting shoes from lengths of garden hose. Federer called them to arrange dinner, clarifying that this time he was seeking not sponsorship but a personal investment. Having negotiated three per cent equity, he used his international profile to turn a Zurich start-up into an £8.2 billion behemoth, with its own limited-edition range christened 'The Roger'. When On was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021, 31.1 million shares were sold at £17.47 each, giving Federer a stake worth £262 million – nearly three times the total he amassed in 24 years as a tennis professional. It is at this point that you wonder if Federer's life is celestially ordained, with even his rare gambles somehow striking gold. The reality is more that he understands, better than just about any sports star in history, what his strengths are and exactly how he can monetise them. Even in elder statesman mode, he is tennis's version of an omniscient being, hovering above all he surveys. Whether it is using shoes to catapult himself towards billionaire status, or enlisting singer Ellie Goulding to sing at his last match over a video montage of his greatest hits, Federer is the man who orchestrates his own drama, who writes the scripts of which nobody else could dream.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
The making of Jack Draper: from teen ‘maniac' to Wimbledon title contender
Towards the end of 2018, a relatively unknown 16-year-old British tennis player took some of his first strides on the professional tennis circuit in a $15,000 (£11,000) tournament in Lagos, Nigeria on the ITF World Tennis Tour. Earlier that summer, Jack Draper had offered a glimpse into his considerable potential with a run to the Wimbledon boys' final and his encouraging first tussles against adult opposition had earned him a modest ATP ranking of No 623. 'I was very different then,' Draper says, smiling. 'A bit of a maniac, to be honest.' Those experiences were key in his development for various reasons. He ended that tournament by winning his third consecutive title, offering him more reason to believe he was on the right path. Along the way, he gained some essential perspective. 'I'd have a wet [racket] grip, because it was so humid there. I'd put it in a bin and the kids were fighting over it. Just the energy from the people there, they were really passionate about tennis,' says Draper. 'To go to those sorts of places was definitely … going from the UK and having a lot of, I guess, things given to me, it definitely helped the way I saw life.' As Draper arrives at Wimbledon as the fourth best player in the world, and seeks out his first deep run at his home grand slam tournament, the 23-year-old's disposition in his youth underlines just how far he has come. During his formative years, he was smaller than many contemporaries and his only route to victory was through grinding, scrapping and outsmarting his rivals. His teenage growth spurt was a transformative event in his career and he now stands at an imposing 1.93m (6ft 4in). That dramatic physical change has allowed Draper to build one of the most well-rounded games on the tour. Although he is now a more offensive player, he has retained his excellent defensive skills from his youth. Draper's wicked, varied lefty serve is one of his most pronounced strengths, even though its consistency is still a work in progress. While many big servers tend to not return as well, Draper is an even more effective returner. His two-handed backhand was the foundation of his success during his youth, but he now looks to dominate with his heavy topspin forehand. He can still draw out errors from behind the baseline even though he has grown comfortable with attempting to dominate all opponents. Draper's affinity for using drop shots and his comfort around the net also provide him with more options than most players to finish any given point. 'You're scared of his forehand because he rips it cross, rips it down the line,' says the three-time grand slam finalist Casper Ruud. 'You're also, in a way, scared of his backhand because he can rip and counter from that side as well. So there aren't many holes in his game that I see or that I feel.' According to Tennis Viz, which uses data metrics to quantify the quality of strokes, Draper is the only player other than the world No 1, Jannik Sinner, to average a rating of more than eight (out of 10) for serve, return, forehand and backhand quality this year. For Draper, being a complete player has been the goal all along. 'When I was younger, I was always thinking: 'If I'm going to be a top player, if I'm going to play someone, what do I want them to think?'' says Draper. 'And I want them to think: 'He has no weaknesses,' because I know that if I play someone who has no weaknesses, I'd be feeling a lot of pressure. So I suppose that's the goal I want to get to. I'm still not fully there, but I'm wanting to get to that.' Of all the shots in his arsenal, Draper's forehand has changed and improved more than anything else. A natural right-hander, his two-handed backhand has always been his most instinctive and reliable groundstroke. When they began working together in 2021, Draper and his coach, James Trotman, spent significant time discussing how to improve his forehand. 'The forehand was an area that I always thought could be a weapon, but it was a weakness as well,' he says. 'Any time anyone would rush it, it would not hold up. I wasn't able to get through the ball as much as I wanted to. We worked on my body positions, how I'm going to be able to come forward. There's a big misconception that to be a top player your forehand has to look a certain way. I don't think that's the truth. You just have to hit the ball in front and learn how to use your body to be effective.' While his forehand is still a work in progress, it has been a decisive factor in his recent success. He has long possessed one of the heaviest forehands in the game, with the stroke averaging 3,158 revolutions per minute (rpm) over the past year, far above the tour average of 2,844rpm, but this year he has been determined to flatten the stroke out, look to dominate opponents with it and attack more frequently down the line. His forehand quality has increased from 7.6 to 7.9, elevating it from 25th on the tour last year to 14th in 2025. Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion Possessing such a varied skill set is clearly an asset to any player, but for a long time Draper still could not find his identity on the court. Last year, as he still struggled to shake off his defensive instincts, Draper hired the former top 10 player Wayne Ferreira as a supplementary coach alongside Trotman. After years of being instructed to play the brand of ultra-offensive tennis befitting a big man, he tried it out. 'I was in a bit of a crisis last year thinking: 'Where's my game going to go? What do I need to change?'' Draper says. 'Then I did certain things and I tried to maybe go to the opposite end of the spectrum and try and hit every ball as hard as I can, and return up the court and do all these things, but it didn't really work, that experiment.' Although he won his first ATP title in Stuttgart during this period, Draper suffered a first-round loss at the French Open followed by a miserable second-round defeat at Wimbledon by Cameron Norrie. By the end of the summer, the experiment was over. The experience taught him that he could find a greater balance between attack and defence in his game, but also a fundamental lesson that he will never forget: he should always trust himself. 'It got to the point where maybe I was thinking that I needed to do something drastic to be a top player,' he says. 'The truth was I just needed to be consistent, trust the work that I was doing, and know that with the right mentality and doing things well day in, day out and preparing the best I can for competitions, that's going to just help me to find more consistency and be the top player I wanted to be. So it feels good to have gone on that journey and realised that it's just hard work, really.'
