The Athletic has live coverage from Day 2 at Wimbledon 2025.
The speed is the thing you notice.
When you attend any sort of sporting event in person — as opposed to watching it on TV — it’s the speed that’s most astonishing. From how quickly a top-class footballer might control the ball and pass it, to the velocity of a baseball being hurled at 90mph-plus.
With tennis though, it’s a little different. The speed of the ball is one thing. And yes, it is astonishingly quick. But it’s more the speed of the players that is striking: how quickly they react to their opponents’ shots.
On day one of Wimbledon 2025, Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard produced the fastest serve in Wimbledon history. He sent down a ball at 153 miles per hour (246 kilometers per hour) — and Taylor Fritz sent it straight back.
How to return the fastest ever serve at The Championships, by @Taylor_Fritz97 😳👏#Wimbledon pic.twitter.com/cFDMzStvsF
— Wimbledon (@Wimbledon) July 1, 2025
Because Mpetshi Perricard’s serve was so fast, all Fritz had to do was move his body out of its way and stick a racket out to send the ball rocketing back. This is what the best returners of big serves do (even if Fritz is not always one of them.) They defuse the grenade. They absorb the pace and give it right back to the server.
But first they have to get to the ball, and that has nothing to do with their racket. That is all about anticipation.
“It seems like he knows minutes before where you are going to serve,” the Italian Lorenzo Musetti about the mind-frazzling experience of facing 24-time Grand Slam champion Novak Djokovic, one of the best returners of all time.
There’s a famous clip of Andy Roddick from the 2007 US Open when he’s facing Roger Federer. He sends down a serve at 140mph — not his fastest, but quick enough to put a hole straight through the head of any normal person who chooses to get in the way. Federer not only returned it but returned it so well that Roddick put his next shot wide and lost the point. Roddick puffs out his cheeks as if to say: “What am I supposed to do?”.
And that’s the reaction of a Grand Slam winner. Those sorts of returns look superhuman, like the players have become Neo from The Matrix and have slowed down the world, able to make things move at their own pace and create time to play the shot.
Which is because that’s sort of what they’re doing.
“What players are constantly trying to do is slow things down in their minds,” says Craig O’Shannessy, a strategy coach for the ATP Tour who has also worked with Djokovic. “On grass, it may seem to be going fast, but they’re just slowing it down.”
This isn’t — you’ll be amazed to learn — some sort of magical power that all tennis players are granted once they join the tour. But more the endgame of a process, careful planning and preparation.
The amount of time a tennis player will have to react to an opponent’s shot varies, but let’s use the example of a serve that a male player could expect to face in most top-level matches, which will be anything between 115 mph to 140 mph. Split the difference and the speed gun lands at 127 mph.
Travelling the 23.77 metres of a tennis court, this would mean a serve reaches the opponent in roughly 0.4 seconds. But there is a wide range of variables: for a start, a serve is travelling diagonally and from a reasonable height, so it will be travelling further than those 23.77 metres, and that’s assuming the receiving player is standing on the baseline — which many don’t.
Then there’s the fact the ball won’t actually be travelling at 127 mph for its whole journey: air resistance will slow it down, as will bouncing and the effect the bounce has depends on the surface and a few other factors.
So we basically have to estimate how quickly it will reach a player, but we can probably put it at something in the region of 0.7-0.8 seconds. For reference, a blink lasts about 0.4 seconds, so it’s not quite blink and you’ll miss it… but maybe blink twice and you’ll miss it.
Either way, it’s fast. So players, one way or another, have to anticipate what’s coming.
“Tennis looks like a game of pinball — but in fact, it’s a game of patterns,” says O’Shannessy, who as part of his coaching and research uses HawkEye to break down a court into sections and is thus able to plan out where the ball goes for most of the time.
“They’re picking up on positioning of the feet, positioning of the body, balance, the angle of the racquet — they see all of these things and they use that to anticipate what’s coming back.
“A lot of what the speed of what they’re doing out there — if you or I were to slow a video down to 25 or 50 per cent of what it is, you would be able to predict what was coming. These players can do that in real time. Through repetition and seeing the same patterns again and again and again, you start to try to get ahead of this.”
Essentially players create databases in their heads, which they then draw upon as they anticipate what will come over the net.
That isn’t possible all the time. At the 2023 tournament, former world No. 1 Victoria Azarenka said that not knowing about her opponent, China’s Yuan Yue, made things more difficult.
“Sometimes you have no time to anticipate and you just have to react. For example, (playing against) an opponent like today, I didn’t know much about her, I’ve never faced her, so it’s a bit more difficult to anticipate because I need to understand or learn her patterns, her technique, her ball toss for the serve etc. When you play someone you know, the anticipation comes a bit more,” she said.
“With some players, you know how they’ll toss the ball a certain way, or if they do a certain thing with their racket — so if you’re able to pick up those cues, you’re able to read them a little bit. But with opponents you don’t know, you have to do it on the go. And sometimes it’s just not enough time. Sometimes you do have to guess and just have to react.”
Conditions can also throw off the best-laid plans/anticipations. Fritz faced Mpetshi Perricard under the roof on No. 1 Court, which took away the variable of wind. The Frenchman thrives in those conditions, because they give his serve less variables to resist and also take away some of the deficiencies in his groundstrokes which the wind can expose. Fritz went two sets down despite winning more points, but came back to level the match at 2-2 before the Wimbledon curfew took away his momentum.
For some, anticipation is something you can work on. For others, it’s innate.
“Some players will track the ball all the way onto the strings,” says O’Shannessy. “Others will watch 95 per cent of the way, but the last five per cent, they know what it’s going to do so their eyes are already forwards. There’s no right or wrong way to do this.”
O’Shannessy cites Federer as an example of a player who, if you watched him very closely at his peak, would already be looking ahead as he struck the ball rather than at the ball as it hit the strings. In effect, the absolute elite players are already preparing for the next shot before they’ve technically completed this one (which is mind-boggling), so when we talk about the greatest players we’ve seen being freaks, it’s not meant as an insult.
The speed is the thing you notice. But to the world’s best tennis players, as it turns out, it’s not actually that fast.
(Top photo: Glyn Kirk / AFP via Getty Images)
