Latest news with #LucianoDarderi
CNA
2 days ago
- Sport
- CNA
ATP roundup: Alexander Bublik wins in Gstaad for first title on clay
Alexander Bublik of Kazakhstan won his first tournament on clay Sunday, topping Juan Manuel Cerundolo 6-4, 4-6, 6-2 at the EFG Swiss Open Gstaad. Bublik, the second seed, won his sixth tour title at the ATP 250 event in the Swiss Alps, in his first final on clay courts. It also was his first meeting with Argentina's Cerundolo. Bublik had 13 aces among his 47 winners in the two-hour, eight-minute match. Cerundolo posted 21 winners against 25 unforced errors. In June, Bublik won the ATP 500 event in Halle, Germany. Nordea Open No. 6 seed Luciano Darderi of Italy captured the championship in Bastad, Sweden, with a 6-4, 3-6, 6-3 win over unseeded Dutchman Jesper De Jong. De Jong was in search of his first career ATP Tour title. It was the third for Darderi, all on clay. He won at Marrakech, Morocco, earlier this season and in Cordoba, Argentina, in 2024 Darderi won 81 per cent (38-of-47) of the points on his first serve and converted three break points, compared to two for De Jong. In the end, just three points separated the two, with Darderi winning 80 and De Jong 77. Plava Laguna Croatia Open The first round in Umag, Croatia, began Sunday with a pair of three-set matches. Czech eighth seed Vit Kopriva rallied past Belgium's Raphael Collignon 3-6, 6-4, 6-3. Kopriva edged Collignon in aces 7-6 while saving 11 of 16 break points and converting 6 of 12 chances to break his opponent's serve. Italy's Francesco Passaro also came from behind in a 4-6, 6-1, 6-2 victory over Croatian wild card Matej Dodig. Passaro limited himself to 17 unforced errors to Dodig's 33.
Reuters
2 days ago
- Sport
- Reuters
ATP roundup: Alexander Bublik wins in Gstaad for first title on clay
July 21 - Alexander Bublik of Kazakhstan won his first tournament on clay Sunday, topping Juan Manuel Cerundolo 6-4, 4-6, 6-2 at the EFG Swiss Open Gstaad. Bublik, the second seed, won his sixth tour title at the ATP 250 event in the Swiss Alps, in his first final on clay courts. It also was his first meeting with Argentina's Cerundolo. Bublik had 13 aces among his 47 winners in the two-hour, eight-minute match. Cerundolo posted 21 winners against 25 unforced errors. In June, Bublik won the ATP 500 event in Halle, Germany. Nordea Open No. 6 seed Luciano Darderi of Italy captured the championship in Bastad, Sweden, with a 6-4, 3-6, 6-3 win over unseeded Dutchman Jesper De Jong. De Jong was in search of his first career ATP Tour title. It was the third for Darderi, all on clay. He won at Marrakech, Morocco, earlier this season and in Cordoba, Argentina, in 2024 Darderi won 81 percent (38-of-47) of the points on his first serve and converted three break points, compared to two for De Jong. In the end, just three points separated the two, with Darderi winning 80 and De Jong 77. Plava Laguna Croatia Open The first round in Umag, Croatia, began Sunday with a pair of three-set matches. Czech eighth seed Vit Kopriva rallied past Belgium's Raphael Collignon 3-6, 6-4, 6-3. Kopriva edged Collignon in aces 7-6 while saving 11 of 16 break points and converting 6 of 12 chances to break his opponent's serve. Italy's Francesco Passaro also came from behind in a 4-6, 6-1, 6-2 victory over Croatian wild card Matej Dodig. Passaro limited himself to 17 unforced errors to Dodig's 33. --Field Level Media
Yahoo
11-07-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
How tennis stars get the rackets, strings and tensions they need for Wimbledon success
THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, LONDON — On the first day of Wimbledon, Ed Day, a university student from just outside London, ran 17.5 kilometers across the All England Club. Those kilometers took him from the on-site stringing center, which is near the players' practice facility to various courts around the ground. His mission? Advertisement Delivering rackets to players who have requested a restring during their match. Day, who along with the other runners who are part of the Court Services team wears a high-visibility vest for the job, has to weave in and out of tennis fans to get where he is going as fast as he possibly can. He has just returned from a sprint to No. 3 Court, and will soon be back out in the heat dodging spectators with another racket in his hand. 'This one is for Anastasia Zakharova, that one's for Luciano Darderi,' he says. 'We have a special tunnel that gets us to No. 3 Court, but after that you are on your own with the masses.' Day worked at Wimbledon last year and says his highlight was delivering a racket to Emma Raducanu, whose coach for this edition, Mark Petchey, has just picked up three rackets ahead of her second-round match against Markéta Vondroušová. That's how the players get their rackets back. The runners also have to bring them for restringing in the first place. Each racket is logged by the strings required and the tension. The old strings will be cut off and a stringer will get to work. Advertisement On day one they had 50 restrings mid-match and 664 across the 256 players who needed them doing before or after matches. By the end of women's semifinal day, 6,400 rackets had passed through the stringing center, which is run by Babolat. Last year's total was 6,188. Twenty five stringers work on 23 machines, from 7 a.m. until shortly after play concludes for the day. Among those in the workshop on day three is Paul Skipp from Portsmouth. The 55-year-old has been stringing rackets since he was 18. This is his 20th time working at Wimbledon, and when finds him, he is in the middle of restringing the racket of American player Tommy Paul. 'I've strung for all the top names. I strung Andy Murray's racket for his first match at Wimbledon in 2005 and I strung Carlos Alcaraz for his first time at Wimbledon too. Advertisement 'I've strung a racket in probably 10-and-a-half minutes,' he says, calmly threading the string through. 'That's when it has come in from court and someone's asked for it really quickly. But normal time is around 17 minutes per racket. 'We try to keep the same stringer for each player, to be consistent. Players like that too especially if they need little changes to be made to tension. Most of the top players won't be demanding too much. You will actually get stranger requests from players who are maybe a little bit further down the rankings like where to tie knots or wanting the logo in a slightly different place.' Manuela Villa Topple knows all about the detailed levels of some requests. The 20-year-old is part of a small team who gives each and every racket their finishing touch by painting on a branded logo. 'After the rackets get strung, they bring it down to our station and we find the right stencil, the right color and we draw on the logos with solvent paint,' she says. Advertisement 'Sometimes they have two logos, two different colors depending on their sponsorship deals. We have to be very careful we don't get it wrong because if we do and it's a certain string type like natural gut [which is made from the intestines of cows] that racket has to be restrung entirely because we can't rub the ink off.' Tennis strings come in three main categories: natural gut; multifilament, which is synthetic but made up of thousands of fibres woven together per string; and polyester, which is a single fibre per string. Polyesters, and some multifilaments, come in different geometries; some have a rough surface for increased spin production. All strings come in different thicknesses: the thinner, the more powerful and comfortable; the thicker, the more controlled and durable. Natural gut is the most expensive, the most powerful, comfortable and plushest; polyester strings are cheaper and offer the most spin and control, but are less comfortable; multifilaments are somewhere in between. If these descriptions sound sweeping, that's because they are. Tennis players, from recreational to professional, are very particular about their strings. Some — including Roger Federer — will not string their racket with just one string, but two. This is a hybrid set-up, offering the benefits of two different types of string by putting one in the mains (the strings that run vertically, parallel to the racket handle) and the crosses (which run perpendicular to the mains.) Advertisement And once they have chosen their strings, they have to choose a tension. As with strings, there is a general range — between 21 kg (46 lbs) and 25 kg (55 lbs) — but some players are outliers. Adrian Mannarino of France plays down at 8.6 kg (19 lbs) on occasion, which is like playing with a trampoline. 'Forty pounds is about the max you can do,' Babolat employee Josh Newton explains while spinning a racket around. 'I'm not sure I've ever had anyone over 40 as that's the max for the machine. The tighter it is the less power off the racket but the ball comes off the strings faster. It has a sensation of popping off the strings but it has less velocity than if you string it looser. Looser is like a trampoline so it sinks in and then it bounces off.' Tension also needs to be adjusted to the weather. In the heat of the early rounds and the semifinals, players will have strung slightly tighter to mitigate the increased liveliness of the balls and the grass. They will have several rackets in their bag during matches, strung at different tensions with half a pound or a pound between them. Advertisement 'They're usually in batches of 12 maybe every few months they change them because of the constant hitting and restringing which will affect the racket a little bit as well,' Skipp says. 'The heat will have affected them here. The players may find they need more rackets, with tension in the strings dropping quicker.' They will also customize their stencils. Red, black and white are the three main colors, but last year's women's singles champion, Barbora Krejčíková, likes to use silver on her Head racket. She takes her own silver paint with her to each tournament. When British duo Eden Silva and Joshua Paris paired up in the mixed doubles they both went logo-free which is rare. Iga Świątek, who will play Amanda Anisimova in the women's final, likes to have her Tecnifibre logo painted as low down on her racket as possible, while Kateřina Siniaková, who won the mixed doubles with partner Sem Verbeek, always wants her red Wilson logo to be painted from the fourth string from the top rather than the fifth. 'She came in and said: 'I know it sounds crazy but for me that just works.' Apparently she can see when the logo's wearing off more when it's on the fourth string but for some it is superstition too,' says Villa Topple, whose highlight has been adding logos to fellow Italian and men's world No. 1 Jannik Sinner's racket. Advertisement 'We try to help the player every time. If they have a special request we will try to do it,' says Eric Ferrazzi, head of racket service for Babolat. The stringing center serves over 700 players at Wimbledon and has been doing so since the company took over the racket services in 2022. Not all players will use the service here: seven-time Wimbledon champion Novak Djokovic uses a private stringer. With just four singles matches left, the organized chaos of the early rounds has given way to a calmer environment. But Day and his hi-vis will still be ready to run, just in case one of the remaining stars needs a racket with which to play the biggest point of their career. This article originally appeared in The Athletic. Sports Business, Culture, Tennis, Women's Tennis 2025 The Athletic Media Company
New York Times
11-07-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
How tennis stars get the rackets, strings and tensions they need for Wimbledon success
THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, LONDON — On the first day of Wimbledon, Ed Day, a university student from just outside London, ran 17.5 kilometers across the All England Club. Those kilometers took him from the on-site stringing center, which is near the players' practice facility to various courts around the ground. Advertisement His mission? Delivering rackets to players who have requested a restring during their match. Day, who along with the other runners who are part of the Court Services team wears a high-visibility vest for the job, has to weave in and out of tennis fans to get where he is going as fast as he possibly can. He has just returned from a sprint to No. 3 Court, and will soon be back out in the heat dodging spectators with another racket in his hand. 'This one is for Anastasia Zakharova, that one's for Luciano Darderi,' he says. 'We have a special tunnel that gets us to No. 3 Court, but after that you are on your own with the masses.' Day worked at Wimbledon last year and says his highlight was delivering a racket to Emma Raducanu, whose coach for this edition, Mark Petchey, has just picked up three rackets ahead of her second-round match against Markéta Vondroušová. That's how the players get their rackets back. The runners also have to bring them for restringing in the first place. Each racket is logged by the strings required and the tension. The old strings will be cut off and a stringer will get to work. On day one they had 50 restrings mid-match and 664 across the 256 players who needed them doing before or after matches. By the end of women's semifinal day, 6,400 rackets had passed through the stringing center, which is run by Babolat. Last year's total was 6,188. Twenty five stringers work on 23 machines, from 7 a.m. until shortly after play concludes for the day. Among those in the workshop on day three is Paul Skipp from Portsmouth. The 55-year-old has been stringing rackets since he was 18. This is his 20th time working at Wimbledon, and when The Athletic finds him, he is in the middle of restringing the racket of American player Tommy Paul. 'I've strung for all the top names. I strung Andy Murray's racket for his first match at Wimbledon in 2005 and I strung Carlos Alcaraz for his first time at Wimbledon too. Advertisement 'I've strung a racket in probably 10-and-a-half minutes,' he says, calmly threading the string through. 'That's when it has come in from court and someone's asked for it really quickly. But normal time is around 17 minutes per racket. 'We try to keep the same stringer for each player, to be consistent. Players like that too especially if they need little changes to be made to tension. Most of the top players won't be demanding too much. You will actually get stranger requests from players who are maybe a little bit further down the rankings like where to tie knots or wanting the logo in a slightly different place.' Manuela Villa Topple knows all about the detailed levels of some requests. The 20-year-old is part of a small team who gives each and every racket their finishing touch by painting on a branded logo. 'After the rackets get strung, they bring it down to our station and we find the right stencil, the right color and we draw on the logos with solvent paint,' she says. 'Sometimes they have two logos, two different colors depending on their sponsorship deals. We have to be very careful we don't get it wrong because if we do and it's a certain string type like natural gut [which is made from the intestines of cows] that racket has to be restrung entirely because we can't rub the ink off.' Tennis strings come in three main categories: natural gut; multifilament, which is synthetic but made up of thousands of fibres woven together per string; and polyester, which is a single fibre per string. Polyesters, and some multifilaments, come in different geometries; some have a rough surface for increased spin production. All strings come in different thicknesses: the thinner, the more powerful and comfortable; the thicker, the more controlled and durable. Natural gut is the most expensive, the most powerful, comfortable and plushest; polyester strings are cheaper and offer the most spin and control, but are less comfortable; multifilaments are somewhere in between. Advertisement If these descriptions sound sweeping, that's because they are. Tennis players, from recreational to professional, are very particular about their strings. Some — including Roger Federer — will not string their racket with just one string, but two. This is a hybrid set-up, offering the benefits of two different types of string by putting one in the mains (the strings that run vertically, parallel to the racket handle) and the crosses (which run perpendicular to the mains.) And once they have chosen their strings, they have to choose a tension. As with strings, there is a general range — between 21 kg (46 lbs) and 25 kg (55 lbs) — but some players are outliers. Adrian Mannarino of France plays down at 8.6 kg (19 lbs) on occasion, which is like playing with a trampoline. 'Forty pounds is about the max you can do,' Babolat employee Josh Newton explains while spinning a racket around. 'I'm not sure I've ever had anyone over 40 as that's the max for the machine. The tighter it is the less power off the racket but the ball comes off the strings faster. It has a sensation of popping off the strings but it has less velocity than if you string it looser. Looser is like a trampoline so it sinks in and then it bounces off.' Tension also needs to be adjusted to the weather. In the heat of the early rounds and the semifinals, players will have strung slightly tighter to mitigate the increased liveliness of the balls and the grass. They will have several rackets in their bag during matches, strung at different tensions with half a pound or a pound between them. 'They're usually in batches of 12 maybe every few months they change them because of the constant hitting and restringing which will affect the racket a little bit as well,' Skipp says. 'The heat will have affected them here. The players may find they need more rackets, with tension in the strings dropping quicker.' They will also customize their stencils. Red, black and white are the three main colors, but last year's women's singles champion, Barbora Krejčíková, likes to use silver on her Head racket. She takes her own silver paint with her to each tournament. When British duo Eden Silva and Joshua Paris paired up in the mixed doubles they both went logo-free which is rare. Iga Świątek, who will play Amanda Anisimova in the women's final, likes to have her Tecnifibre logo painted as low down on her racket as possible, while Kateřina Siniaková, who won the mixed doubles with partner Sem Verbeek, always wants her red Wilson logo to be painted from the fourth string from the top rather than the fifth. Advertisement 'She came in and said: 'I know it sounds crazy but for me that just works.' Apparently she can see when the logo's wearing off more when it's on the fourth string but for some it is superstition too,' says Villa Topple, whose highlight has been adding logos to fellow Italian and men's world No. 1 Jannik Sinner's racket. 'We try to help the player every time. If they have a special request we will try to do it,' says Eric Ferrazzi, head of racket service for Babolat. The stringing center serves over 700 players at Wimbledon and has been doing so since the company took over the racket services in 2022. Not all players will use the service here: seven-time Wimbledon champion Novak Djokovic uses a private stringer. With just four singles matches left, the organized chaos of the early rounds has given way to a calmer environment. But Day and his hi-vis will still be ready to run, just in case one of the remaining stars needs a racket with which to play the biggest point of their career.
Straits Times
07-07-2025
- Politics
- Straits Times
Wimbledon expansion plan goes into legal tie-break
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox Tennis - Wimbledon - All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, London, Britain - July 4, 2025 General view during the third round match between Australia's Jordan Thompson and Italy's Luciano Darderi REUTERS/Toby Melville TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY LONDON - Wimbledon fans will have eyes only for the tennis this week but for those who run the world's oldest and most prestigious Grand Slam, the real high-stakes contest will unfold not on their grass, but in London's Royal Courts of Justice. On one side of the legal net is the campaign group Save Wimbledon Park, while facing them in a judicial review of their ambitious expansion plan on Tuesday and Wednesday will be the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (AELTC). It is the latest stage of a long-running fight that has split the south-west London "village", which has been home to the Championships since 1877. Last September the AELTC secured planning permission from the Greater London Authority (GLA) to treble the size of the main site to include 39 new courts including an 8,000-seat show court by redeveloping a former golf course on parkland land it already owns. The 200-million-pound ($272.92-million) expansion aims to increase daily capacity to 50,000 people from the current 42,000, upgrade facilities and move the qualifying rounds on site to mirror the Australian, French, and U.S. Opens. The plans have the backing of several leading players, including Novak Djokovic, and 62% of 10,000 residents in Merton and Wandsworth, the London boroughs that share the new site, also support the scheme, according to the AELTC. 'Our confidence in the development and the proposals that we've been working on for many years is as strong as it ever has been,' Wimbledon tournament director Jamie Baker told Reuters. 'For the championships to continue to be in the position that it is and to deliver all the benefits to stakeholders including the local community it is vital that we are able to stage the tournament on one site and bring all the grounds together." However, this week's judicial review will decide whether the GLA's decision to grant planning permission was unlawful. Opponents of the development, including Thelma Ruby, a 100-year-old former actress who lives in a flat overlooking the park, and West Hill Ward Councillor Malcolm Grimston, say the club's plans will cause environmental damage and major disruption to the area. 'It's terribly important that it does not go ahead not just for myself but for the whole planet and future generations," Ruby told Reuters. "I overlook this beautiful landscape and there are all sorts of covenants that say you mustn't build on it, and yet the tennis people have this unnecessary plan they admit will cut down all these glorious trees, which will harm wildlife. 'They're using concrete, building roads, they're going to have lorries polluting and passing my window every 10 minutes. The whole area will be in chaos as they're closing off roads,' she said. Save Wimbledon Park says the GLA failed to consider covenants that were agreed by the AELTC, including restrictions on redeveloping the land, when it bought the Wimbledon Park golf course freehold from Merton council in 1993 for 5.2 million pounds. The AELTC paid a reported 63.5 million pounds to buy the Golf Club's lease, which was due to run until 2041. The campaign group also believes the GLA failed to consider the land's statutory Public Recreation Trust status which means it should be held as "public walks or pleasure grounds". 'It is not antipathy towards the AELTC that's driving this, as some of the benefits are real, such as the extension of lake,' councillor Grimston told Reuters. 'The problem is that it will treble the footprint of the current Championship and turn what currently has very much a feel of being rural England and a gentle pace of life into an industrial complex that would dominate the views of the lake. 'That's why it's classified as Metropolitan Open Land, which is the urban equivalent of the green belt that has been protected for many decades in planning law in the UK and rightly so,' he said. The AELTC say the plans will improve the biodiversity of the park, as well as bringing parts of it back into public use. 'The London Wildlife trust have endorsed the plans, they've spent many hours scrutinising our analysis and our expert views," the AELTC's head of corporate affairs Dominic Foster said. "We know that this expansion will deliver a very significant benefit to biodiversity, whereas golf courses are not good for biodiversity.' REUTERS
