Three Kings of Tennis
Analyzing the trend of tennis players
Today I’m going to talk about tennis how it has aged over the past decades.
What is the ATP and WTA Tour?
To get started, let’s refresh our memory about the professional scene in tennis. ATP and WTA are worldwide professional tennis tournaments for men and women respectively. Besides the opportunity to win prize money from tournaments, players also accumulate ranking points. Ranking points are awarded according to the prestige of the tournament, and the stage of tournament reached, with the four Grand Slams awarding the most points.
- Australian Open — Melbourne, January
- French Open — Paris, May/June
- Wimbledon — London, June/July
- US Open — New York City, August/September
I will be analyzing the quarterfinalists of Grand Slams from ATP and WTA since 1983. Historically, young players generally perform better in sports compare to their elder counterparts. However, this trend and misconception do not hold true for tennis any longer.
How I found the data?
After having no luck in finding anything noteworthy through searching dataset websites for tennis data. I stumbled upon a rather minimalistic website for tennis data, called tennisabstract. It has datasets tracking tennis matches since the 70s in his GitHub account. With the 3 kings of tennis: Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, and Novak Djokovic all over 30 years old and combined hold 53 major singles titles. Based on these facts alone, I am intrigued and set out to find out if they are the exceptions or if there is a trend.
What does my analysis show?
After compiling through dozens of csv files, I was able to make the graphs below. The shaded background behind the average age line represents the standard deviation of the top 100 players’ age.
The majority of the top players used to be dominated by Americans but has been taken over by Europeans over the last decades. Although the graph represents a lot of data, it doesn’t show very clearly the rising age trend. So I made another graph that is simple and to the point.
The average age of the top 100 ranked ATP players hovered around 24 years old, and since 1987 it has been increasing steadily to 28 years old. Currently, 34 of the top 100 ranked players are over 30 years old. One of the factors of higher average age attributes to the three kings of tennis that still reigns the court today. Eldest one being Roger Federer, who is turning 38 years old.
Inspired by FiveThirtyEight, I made a couple more graphs for Grand Slams.
Currently in June 2019:
Novak Djokovic, 32 years old — Rank 1st — 15 Grand Slam titles
Rafael Nadal, 33 years old — Rank 2nd — 18 Grand Slam titles
Roger Federer, 37 years old — Rank 3rd —20 Grand Slam titles
Currently in June 2019:
Serena Williams, 37 years old — Rank 11th — 23 Grand Slam title
Venus Williams, 39 years old — Rank 44th — 7 Grand Slam titles
The increase in age also reflects in the elites of top professional tennis players.
How are the veterans able to keep up?
Andy Murray showed great promise when he reached №1 ranking, defeating Djokovic, Federer, and Nadal back in 2016. However, after his injury and subsequent hip surgery, he has fallen out of the top pro scene. Although he is an isolated case, it seems that other younger players are also having trouble breaking through the formidable old-timers.
Younger athletes are always known to have better physical capabilities than the older generation. However, what they lack is a wealth of experience that the veterans have gathered over their career. I think with the surge of technological advances in the past decades, tennis players have gotten smarter about prolonging their career through conditioning, training, diet and most importantly a schedule that’s sustainable. Players also seem to have less catastrophic injuries that end careers with better health care. Now, it seems that the veteran’s strategic prowess is overcoming their declining physical abilities.
Lastly, a quote from Roger Federer in 2019, who held the world №1 tennis player for a record of 310 weeks, including a record 237 consecutive weeks.
My four sons make me keep like this. And that’s perfect. I notice I am older as a player when an issue comes up. Before, if I had a back injury, it lasted for a day. Now it may be three days, a week… things last more, definitely.
But getting older also has positives. You have the needed experienced to know how to prevent. When you are young and you feel something, you are like: “Oh, my god!” You get panicked. Now you listen to what your body says.
