It is rampant sexism to say women are too frail for five sets

Telegraph

14-07-2025

That glaringly chauvinistic attitude is the one form of sexism about which tennis has nothing to say. Rows about schedules, about whether the top female players at Wimbledon suffer from receiving insufficient exposure on Centre and Court No 1 or from having the final on a Saturday rather than a Sunday, are just distractions from the core issue of why the workload is so disproportionately divided by sex. Are we really to presume that Swiatek, the champion in 2025, cannot cope with a best-of-five? This absurd presumption would have been dismissed even in the late 19th century: at the 1892 United States National Championships, the precursor to the US Open, Mabel Cahill beat Bessie Moore in the women's final 5-7, 6-3, 6-4, 4-6, 6-2.
You sense that Swiatek's towelling of Anisimova, a sporting drama unworthy of the stage, has focused a few minds. 'This is when you are desperate for the women's final to be a best-of-five,' said Laura Robson, as she watched the awful humiliation unfold. 'If she just had that much more time to know that she could play her way into the match, it would feel so different to her.' It was a view rooted in reality: Gaston Gaudio was routed 6-0, 6-3 by Guillermo Coria in the first two sets of the 2004 French Open final, but the best-of-five format meant that he still found a way to win.
When Wimbledon announced equal prize money in 2007, the moment was heralded as a historic watershed. A 'no-brainer,' declared Billie Jean King, a key figure in the fight for equality. Another one of King's battle cries was 'equal pay for equal work'. The problem, however, is that there is no such thing when it comes to equal work in the Grand Slam setting, with parity in the prize funds but vast discrepancies in the match lengths merely ensuring that the men are underpaid. At the 2016 Australian Open, Djokovic, the men's champion, was on court for so much longer across his seven rounds than female counterpart Angelique Kerber that he earned £56,000 an hour less.
Even a moderate voice such as Nadal has expressed reservations about a blanket approach to equal pay for men and women, arguing that such a policy should be based on the revenue that players bring into tennis, as well as the levels of audience interest. Surely the most elegant solution, though, is to implement best-of-five for women, at least in the closing stages of majors. While concurrent best-of-five male and female tournaments would create fiendish logistical difficulties, there is no good reason why it cannot work from the quarter-finals onwards, when the financial rewards almost double with each round.
Differences in stamina? Forget it. Research indicates that the longer the physical challenge, the more the separation between men's and women's performances tapers off, with only a four per cent gap in some ultra-endurance competitions. Tennis' in-built perception of female frailty is rooted in a fallacy. In 2008, Venus Williams beat her sister Serena in straight sets to win her fifth Wimbledon singles title. Two hours later, the siblings were back on court to win the doubles. You struggled to envisage Federer and Nadal being able to conjure quite the same encore when, at 9.16pm the next day, their 4hr 48min duel for the ages finished in near-darkness. So, let us stop pretending that best-of-three offers even a remote equivalence, and start using Swiatek's express double-bagel as a cue for driving equality in play as well as pay.