A view from The Queue
A Wimbledon tradition up close
I’m reporting live from Wimbledon for the next fortnight. I can’t wait to bring you along for the highlight of my working year, and will be publishing 2-3 articles per week as there’s so much I want to share!
I also wanted to flag that we’re having a launch event for my book, Building Champions, in Battersea Bookshop on July 8th. There’ll be drinks, screens showing the tennis at the Battersea Power Station, and a Q&A chaired by my wonderful friend, sports reporter Fadumo Olow.
For anyone local who might want to join, I’d love to see some But Do You Actually Like Sport? lovely subscribers there! For more details on tickets, visit the link here.
Now, to the All England Club…
It’s 6:25am, already a balmy 20 degrees Celsius and there’s a man walking around a field doing his best John McEnroe impression, complete with tiny shorts, curly-haired wig and a sweatband wrapped around his head.
Where else, but the Wimbledon Queue?
The Queue has been an enduring tradition at Wimbledon since 1922. For more than 100 years, it has given people the opportunity to camp out on a field just a five minute walk from the All England Club, for a chance to get some of the most coveted tickets in tennis.
Every day, 1,500 tickets are offered across the show courts — including Centre Court and No 1 Court — while several thousand grounds passes are handed out too. Wimbledon remains one of the final live sporting events to hold back tickets until the day of play and offer this democratic, quintessentially British queueing system.
A woman who walked into the park around the same time as I did (6:15am) was given queue number 7786. A couple of hours later, before 9am on Monday morning on Day One of the Championships, Wimbledon had already issued advice to tell people to stop entering the queue. More than 10,000 people had flocked to the park, and they were at capacity.
Some were decked out in Wimbledon all whites, one woman with tennis balls for earrings, another group preparing to wear their strawberry face masks (which looked like a mistake considering the record-breaking 30+ temp forecast). All had the same plan: get through the All England Club gates — and maybe onto Centre Court.
A few thousand had arrived on Monday early doors, as I had, but the really committed fans were camping out since as early as Friday evening. I met a woman from New Zealand who arrived on Saturday morning, with hopes for a Centre Court ticket. This was the only reason she flew all the way from Auckland? I asked. “Yes, of course,” she said brightly, like I was asking a silly question. Despite two nights camping, she was absolutely buzzing about her first queue experience, and told me about the friends she had made from Uruguay, Washington and the UK during the couple of days spent there.
Two British students told me they had suffered through two nights of the heatwave too, but were slightly less enthusiastic. “I slept outside on a mat last night, because the tent was like an oven,” one said grimly.
Apart from the sleeping arrangements, there’s the small matter of trying to keep busy for the best part of 72 hours, with limited shade might I add. One couple had a full-sized wooden chess board set up on their picnic blanket, an intense game in flow before 7am. Some boys were playing keepie-uppies with a football, I spotted many fans reading while others were focused on freshening up — with plenty of women doing their morning skincare routine sat on the grass with a handheld mirror balances between their crossed legs. We were far from Glastonbury in Somerset, but the vibes were not completely dissimilar (though with slightly less glitter involved).
While it really is just a park where the punters pitch up each year, it does look quite different to how I imagine it did in 1922. For one, there’s a WiFi hub, where some people were tapping away at their laptops. There’s also an ice cream van planted right in front of the organised rows of queues. For those who didn’t fancy a Mr Whippy for breakfast, there were food trucks with queues snaking around the place, offering waffles, sarnies, burgers and the all important coffee.
They were catering for droves of people, as many at the All England Club described this year’s opening day of queueing as attracting “thousands more” fans than 12 months ago.
Two Scottish fans who spoke with me confirmed this. They described how they had been coming to the queue for the best part of 10 years and always arrived on Sunday at 1pm. As big Andy Murray fans, that arrival time always guaranteed they would be inside the first 500 fans queuing, to get tickets for Centre Court. But when they rocked up at their usual time this year, they were handed queue No. 1045 and 1046. “We’re not sure whether we’ll make the Centre Court cut,” they said, a little dejectedly. “There’s always people who try to cut in too, complete chancers, but we’re keeping an eye out.”
Those anxieties were clear among a few people I spoke with on Monday morning. With the event being particularly busy — not doubt because of the good weather, compared to the days of unending rain we had last year — and everyone at the mercy of the order of play, many wondered whether they’d be able to watch the best of the action they had hoped for.
Two Irish fans told me they were going to give up a chance for Centre or No 1 Court, and instead aim for Court 2, because the order of play on the top two courts was too heavily British leaning, with Katie Boulter, Emma Raducanu and Jacob Fearnley among those scheduled. “No offence, but we’re just not interested,” they said.
The pull of Centre Court is too much for others though, and I can understand it. Five Canadian women in their 20s had dreamt of seeing the grass of Centre, they said, as well as the Royal Box, and weren’t bothered about who they got to watch. Their girls trip was a bucket list item: “We’d do anything to get there, even sleep in a field!”
That’s all for now!
Molly x