The speed is the thing you notice.<\/p>\n
When you attend any sort of sporting event in person \u2014 as opposed to watching it on TV \u2014 it\u2019s the speed that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
With tennis<\/a> though, it\u2019s a little different. The speed of the ball is one thing. And yes, it is astonishingly quick. But it\u2019s more the speed of the players that is striking: how quickly they react to their opponents\u2019 shots.<\/p>\n 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) \u2014 and Taylor Fritz sent it straight back.<\/p>\n How to return the fastest ever serve at The Championships, by @Taylor_Fritz97<\/a> \ud83d\ude33\ud83d\udc4f#Wimbledon<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/cFDMzStvsF<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Wimbledon (@Wimbledon) July 1, 2025<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Because Mpetshi Perricard\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n But first they have to get to the ball, and that has nothing to do with their racket. That is all about anticipation.<\/p>\n \u201cIt seems like he knows minutes before where you are going to serve,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a famous clip of Andy Roddick from the 2007 US Open when he\u2019s facing Roger Federer. He sends down a serve at 140mph \u2014 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: \u201cWhat am I supposed to do?\u201d.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Which is because that\u2019s sort of what they\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat players are constantly trying to do is slow things down in their minds,\u201d says Craig O\u2019Shannessy, a strategy coach for the ATP Tour who has also worked with Djokovic. \u201cOn grass, it may seem to be going fast, but they\u2019re just slowing it down.\u201d<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t \u2014 you\u2019ll be amazed to learn \u2014 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.<\/p>\n The amount of time a tennis player will have to react to an opponent\u2019s shot varies, but let\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s assuming the receiving player is standing on the baseline \u2014 which many don\u2019t.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the fact the ball won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s not quite blink and you\u2019ll miss it\u2026 but maybe blink twice and you\u2019ll miss it.<\/p>\n Either way, it\u2019s fast. So players, one way or another, have to anticipate what\u2019s coming.<\/p>\n \u201cTennis looks like a game of pinball \u2014 but in fact, it\u2019s a game of patterns,\u201d says O\u2019Shannessy, 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re picking up on positioning of the feet, positioning of the body, balance, the angle of the racquet \u2014 they see all of these things and they use that to anticipate what\u2019s coming back.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of what the speed of what they\u2019re doing out there \u2014 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Essentially players create databases in their heads, which they then draw upon as they anticipate what will come over the net.<\/p>\n That isn\u2019t possible all the time. At the 2023 tournament, former world No. 1 Victoria Azarenka said that not knowing about her opponent, China\u2019s Yuan Yue, made things more difficult.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes you have no time to anticipate and you just have to react. For example, (playing against) an opponent like today, I didn\u2019t know much about her, I\u2019ve never faced her, so it\u2019s 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cWith some players, you know how they\u2019ll toss the ball a certain way, or if they do a certain thing with their racket \u2014 so if you\u2019re able to pick up those cues, you\u2019re able to read them a little bit. But with opponents you don\u2019t know, you have to do it on the go. And sometimes it\u2019s just not enough time. Sometimes you do have to guess and just have to react.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a> took away his momentum.<\/p>\n \u201cSome players will track the ball all the way onto the strings,\u201d says O\u2019Shannessy. \u201cOthers will watch 95 per cent of the way, but the last five per cent, they know what it\u2019s going to do so their eyes are already forwards. There\u2019s no right or wrong way to do this.\u201d<\/p>\n O\u2019Shannessy 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\u2019ve technically completed this one (which is mind-boggling), so when we talk about the greatest players we\u2019ve seen being freaks, it\u2019s not meant as an insult.<\/p>\n The speed is the thing you notice. But to the world\u2019s best tennis players, as it turns out, it\u2019s not actually that fast.<\/p>\n (Top photo: Glyn Kirk \/ AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n\n
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