This year
Serena Williams won the Wimbledon Championships for the sixth time. It seems
that quite a few players have won Wimbledon a lot of times. Martina Navratilova
won it nine times. Steffi Graf won it seven times. Serena’s sister Venus won it
five times. On the men’s side, Pete Sampras and Roger Federer have won it seven
times each.
But then it
seems like you can win the French Open a lot of times too if you’re good on
clay. Rafael Nadal has won that tournament nine times. Bjorn Borg won it six
times. Chris Evert won the women’s singles seven times, and Graf got six
titles.
Although
maybe the Australian Open is the ‘easy’ Grand Slam tournament to win if it
suits your game – after all, Novak Djokovic won it for the fifth time earlier
this year, and Serena Williams won it for the sixth time. Or as Bill Simmons
once noted, maybe tennis
just lends itself to a player being completely dominant.
So which
Grand Slam tournament has had the most dominant players, i.e. the highest
concentration of winners? To measure this I calculated a concentration measure
known as Herfindahl-Hirschman
Index for each of the Grand Slam tournaments in the Open era (1968 onwards).
The higher the index, the more concentrated the winners have been. The results
were as follows:
Men’s singles: Wimbledon: 0.078, French Open: 0.075,
US Open: 0.060, Australian Open: 0.052.
Women’s singles: Wimbledon: 0.101, US Open: 0.075,
French Open: 0.069, Australian Open: 0.066.
So Wimbledon
has the highest concentration of winners for both the men’s and women’s
singles. I’ve noted above the main winners: in the men’s singles Sampras,
Federer and Borg have won 19 of the 48 titles; in the women’s singles
Navratilova, Graf, and the Williams sisters have won 27 titles between them. If
you look at the combined totals of the top three or four winners for the other
major tournaments they each lag behind those numbers.
Wimbledon – the most traditional, prestigious of
Grand Slam tournaments. But also the most uncompetitive as well.
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