Retirements at Wimbledon
What a strange day that was yesterday? Most of the commentators were a little perplexed by the unfolding retirement situation and then to top it off we have defending champion Federer out in road two, which opens up the tournament significantly for Mr Murray.
But of course the talk was all about the large number of retirements, so lets see if it really was that unusual.
Checking back on women’s Tennis at Wimbledon there have been 12 retirements and three walkovers in the last five years. To put that into perspective there are 127 matches each year at Wimbledon. So there are very few retirements in the women’s game 1.58% of matches end in retirement.
I have a bit more data on the men’s game with stretches back to the year 2000. Overall 3.54% of all matches ended in retirement for the men. In total we measured 63 retirements and the ‘worst’ year was 2008. In 2007 of course we had Djokovic retire in his semi final against Nadal, but most retirements occur in the early rounds. That’s the only retirement I could find in the 1/4 finals or later. 70% of retirements were in the 1st round and 17% in the second round, followed by 10% in the third then it gets very thing from there. Basically all but two of the 63 I found occurred beyond the third round. It would appears retirements in early rounds are much more common, but of course there are more matches in the earlier rounds. But you may also have players who know they are injured, but don’t want to admit it. When I compared this to other tournaments they all looked pretty similar to be honest.
The US open had a lot of retirements in 2011, 11 in total in the men’s and six in the women’s. But double figures over a tournament is pretty rare, I can only see twice that this has happened in the men’s game. So there you have to conclude that such a large number in one day is very exceptional, it’s site right out there on the edge of the bell curve. But of course the question is why. Probably just one of those coincidences, a black swan as it were.
Category: Tennis
