LONDON — Either Amanda Anisimova or Iga Swiatek will leave the All England Club's grass courts as Wimbledon's eighth consecutive first-time women's champion.
Why has there been such a revolving door? Chris Evert has some thoughts about various elements that, as she put it ahead of Saturday's final, ''make it difficult to feel completely secure and confident on this elusive surface.''
For one, there's the amount of talent in the game — ''deeper now than ever,'' said Evert, a Hall of Famer who won three of her 18 Grand Slam titles at Wimbledon in the 1970s and 1980s and was the runner-up six times during an era when Martina Navratilova won a record nine singles championships there.
Plus, Evert noted, there's a short turnaround after the red clay of the French Open, leaving only two to three weeks to practice and prepare for what she called a ''polar opposite'' surface. Another contributing factor are the uneven bounces and other adjustments required on grass.
And with no completely dominant figure since Serena Williams retired after the 2022 U.S. Open, there is more room for new faces such as the 13th-seeded Anisimova, a 23-year-old American who will be participating in her first major final against Swiatek, a former No. 1 who won four trophies at Roland-Garros and one at the U.S. Open but hadn't been past the quarterfinals at Wimbledon until now.
''I never even dreamt that it's going to be possible for me to play in the final,'' said Swiatek, a 24-year-old from Poland who hadn't been in a title match as a professional at any grass-court tournament until three weeks ago, when she was the runner-up at Bad Homburg, Germany. ''I thought I experienced everything on the court, '' Swiatek said. ''But I didn't experience playing well on grass.''
Sure did Thursday during her 6-2, 6-0 win against Belinda Bencic in the semifinals.
''Maybe I would have had to play my absolutely best tennis of my life and risk every shot to beat her today, the way she played,'' Bencic said.
