\u201cLet\u2019s ban the word \u201csurprise\u201d from our Wimbledon vocabulary,\u201d declared Mourtoglou in a post on LinkedIn. \u201cYou can\u2019t call something a surprise if it happens every single year.<\/p>\n
\u201c23 seeded players, 13 men and 10 women, including 8 top-10s, are out in the 2025 first round. Zverev, Gauff, Rune, Medvedev, Pegula, Tsitsipas\u2026 gone. It sounds unreal. But at Wimbledon, it happens. Every. Single. Year.<\/p>\n
More Tennis News<\/h2>\n
\u2018The most nervy matches:\u2019 Why have so many top seeds struggled at Wimbledon?<\/a><\/p>\n The 3 reigning French Open champions to lose in first round at Wimbledon as Coco Gauff joins list<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWimbledon is unique and the transition from clay to grass is brutal. There are only three weeks between Roland-Garros and Wimbledon. That\u2019s not enough time for the top players to perform well.<\/p>\n \u201cClay and grass are polar opposites. On clay: high bounce, long rallies, sliding, baseline endurance. On grass: low bounce, explosive movement, serve & return, short points.<\/p>\n \u201cPlayers have no time to adapt. Roland-Garros ends, and just three weeks l,ater you\u2019re expected to perform at peak level on a surface you only see 2-3 weeks a year.<\/p>\n \u201cTop players are exhausted. They go deep at Roland-Garros. Then they rest. Then they get only a few days of grass prep and boom, it\u2019s Wimbledon.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd let\u2019s be clear: mastering grass takes time. But no one has the time. That\u2019s the real problem.<\/p>\n Patrick Mouratoglou<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cSo what happens? You step into round one of a Grand Slam on a surface you don\u2019t fully control\u2026 and you face someone whose game naturally fits grass better. And suddenly, you\u2019re out.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s frustrating. But unless the calendar changes and I don\u2019t see how it can, given the weather constraints and the tradition of Wimbledon, this will keep happening.<\/p>\n \u201cThe question is no longer why it happens. It\u2019s: How do the best players adapt fast enough before it\u2019s too late? Because it\u2019s sad to have most of the top players losing early in a Grand Slam.\u201d<\/p>\n Mouratoglou\u2019s comments are hard to dispute, but it is also tough to find a way to change the brief gap between the French Open and Wimbledon.<\/p>\n The solution may be moving Wimbledon to the third and fouth weeks in July, but that would then overlap with the US hard court season that gets underway in earnest in early August.<\/p>\n The ATP and WTA Tour\u2019s decision to extend their marquee events ahead of the US Open has also shrunk the options to create a bigger gap between the French Open and Wimbledon, so the game\u2019s top players look set to be stuck with the current set-up for the next few years.<\/p>\n READ NEXT: <\/strong>The 9 biggest Wimbledon upsets of all time \u2013 ranked!<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n The post Patrick Mouratoglou explains why the big name exits at Wimbledon are no surprise<\/a> appeared first on Tennis365<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Patrick Mouratoglou has insisted the catalogue of upsets in the first week of Wimbledon is not a shock, as he has claimed the word \u2018surprise\u2019 needs to be removed from this Grand Slam. The three-week transition period between the end of the French Open on clay courts and the start of Wimbledon leaves players short […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":695,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tennisring.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Patrick](\"https:\/\/www.tennis365.com\/content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Patrick-Mouratoglou.jpg\")
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