Latest news with #HarriHeliovaara
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Britain's Patten through to doubles quarter-finals
Henry Patten (left) is also already through to the mixed doubles quarter-finals with partner Olivia Nicholls [Getty Images] Wimbledon champions Henry Patten and Harri Heliovaara moved into the quarter-finals of the French Open men's doubles with a dominant win over Rohan Bopanna and Adam Pavlasek. The second seeds cruised to their 6-2 7-6 (7-5) victory on court 14 to set up a tie with American ninth seeds Christian Harrison and Evan King in the last eight. Advertisement Briton Patten and Finland's Heliovaara only started partnering each other last year but are already targeting their third Grand Slam triumph having won last year's Wimbledon and this year's Australian Open titles. In the third round of the women's doubles, Britain's Olivia Nicholls and Slovakian partner Tereza Mihalikova were beaten 6-7 (4-7) 7-6 (6-3) 6-0 by Olga Danilovic of Serbia and Anastasia Potapova of Russia. Nicholls and Patten will feature together in Monday's mixed doubles quarter-finals where the British duo are taking on Italian third seeds Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori.
BBC News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Britain's Patten through to doubles quarter-finals
Wimbledon champions Henry Patten and Harri Heliovaara moved into the quarter-finals of the French Open men's doubles with a dominant win over Rohan Bopanna and Adam second seeds cruised to their 6-2 7-6 (7-5) victory on court 14 to set up a tie with American ninth seeds Christian Harrison and Evan King in the last Patten and Finland's Heliovaara only started partnering each other last year but are already targeting their third Grand Slam triumph having won last year's Wimbledon and this year's Australian Open the third round of the women's doubles, Britain's Olivia Nicholls and Slovakian partner Tereza Mihalikova were beaten 6-7 (4-7) 7-6 (6-3) 6-0 by Olga Danilovic of Serbia and Anastasia Potapova of and Patten will feature together in Monday's mixed doubles quarter-finals where the British duo are taking on Italian third seeds Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori.
Times
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Meet Henry Patten, Britain's unheralded Wimbledon champion
He is the No2 seed heading into Roland Garros. He triumphed at Wimbledon last summer and then headed to Australia and won that grand-slam tournament as well . . . yet you may not have heard of him. Which is faintly ridiculous given that both those titles were won amid high drama and with sublime, entertaining skill. Henry Patten is a British doubles specialist and his breakthrough success has come alongside Harri Heliovaara, a passionate Finn whose reaction to winning on Centre Court was arguably the highlight of last year's championships. Both players were in slight shock, given they were unseeded, but Heliovaara repeatedly broke down under the fraternal gaze of his partner. It was the stuff of dreams and the two men headed to the champions' dinner as, well, champions. Patten, 29, was shy at the thought of giving a speech but had prepared to say a few words to thank the coaching team who had helped him and his partner seal glory. By the denouement of the men's doubles, Centre Court was jam-packed and raucous in support of the battling Brit, but the achievement featured for only a few seconds on the video shown at the dinner. It was a sign of things to come. Patten's triumph was not even mentioned in the speeches. It was a kick in the teeth. 'I was absolutely fuming, to be honest,' he says. 'I was thinking maybe I would get a 'Congratulations to the men's doubles champions', especially for being a British winner. 'It's something that, at the time, I thought was really celebrated. And there was nothing.' Heliovaara, 35, blogged words to the effect that the food was nice but not the lack of recognition, and Patten mentioned his dismay to a few people at the National Tennis Centre, which led to Debbie Jevans, the chairwoman of the All England Club, writing each of them a letter of apology, stating that their omission had been a complete oversight. 'All I can hope for is that it doesn't happen again, that whoever has that moment in the future, they don't have that disappointment,' Patten says. 'Which I think hopefully has now been solved.' What has not yet been solved is the way doubles is often overlooked by tournament and TV schedulers. When Patten won in Melbourne there was almost no one there to see it, with the match finishing at 2am local time. A family from his home town of Manningtree, Essex, who had moved to Australia and whom Patten has known since the age of five, were there, as were a clutch of ecstatic Finns. Patten's tennis career was forged in the United States while he studied at the University of North Carolina before a postgraduate course at Durham, and he turned professional in 2020. The closest he thought he would get to being a regular at Wimbledon was when he worked collating data for IBM at the championships in 2016. His partnership with Heliovaara began only in April last year, when the Finn was ranked slightly higher. He was initially a little reluctant to commit, but they complement each other beautifully. Doubles does have its big moments; there is the Davis Cup and, of course, the Olympics. Patten smiles as he recalls the euphoria prompted by Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz pairing up at the Paris Games. 'All of a sudden everyone was watching the doubles, and they did pretty well,' Patten says. 'There were lots of exciting storylines that came out of that. And people enjoy watching doubles. They really do. 'The most important thing is, how much does the viewer care about the player? How well do they know the player? Obviously, when I'm playing in Wimbledon, people kind of feel that connection to me. But when I'm playing in, let's say Shanghai, let's face it, they haven't seen me on the telly. They haven't seen me on any of the social media. So I don't understand why they're going to watch that match, to be fair. 'There is a real lack of visibility and connection for the fans.' Should Patten compete at the LA Olympics in 2028, though, the connection will flourish. Becoming an Olympian is his dream. Being the British No1 in men's doubles gives him some control over plotting how to do that, especially in terms of who to team up with. He admits that pairing up with another British player would also make life 'a lot easier' for Leon Smith, the GB Davis Cup team captain. In the meantime, though, there is little appetite to interfere with his fruitful partnership with Heliovaara, whose dream is also to compete at an Olympics but who paused his career in 2013 when suffering from an autoimmune disease. Two grand-slam titles may not have propelled Patten to becoming a household name just yet but his day-to-day life has changed a good deal. 'I've got my picture on the wall at the National Tennis Centre [in southwest London] which is really nice. Once you get to a certain world ranking, they support you really well. I have a doctor, I have a nutritionist, I have a personal trainer, private health insurance with Bupa. 'I have access to Louis Cayer, who is the best doubles coach in the world. I have access to all of the facilities whenever I want. It is without a doubt the best doubles training programme in the world and the most successful one too. So it's really exciting to be a part of that.' What has also changed post-Wimbledon is the attitude of his peers. 'Respect from my colleagues grew massively,' he says. 'Tennis is a funny sport. It's basically a bunch of extremely competitive men travelling around the world together and seeing each other every week. 'People know much more about who I am and my world ranking kind of shot up and they were, I don't know, worried or excited about it — one of the two. Because when you go up, someone else has to come down. 'Last year we were playing much, much smaller tournaments but now we qualify for Monte Carlo [where they reached the semi-finals] and Madrid [where they got to the quarter-finals]. I'd never played in Monte Carlo before, I'd never played in Madrid before. They are much bigger tournaments that are much nicer to travel to and you're kind of treated better in general with better hotels and better food on site.' Patten has been recognised in the street but he thinks that's because he was carrying tennis gear. He still goes, now and again, to his local chess club in Manningtree, in an old church, where nobody really chats about anything not related to chess. Patten enjoys playing on clay, and he and Heliovaara will be the No2 seeds at the French Open MATHIAS SCHULZ/ZUMA PRESS WIRE/ALAMY 'They all think I'm just an idiot. I lose every match when I go there. I think of it in terms of tennis and it's like I'm a pretty bad club tennis player,' he says. 'They don't know I'm a tennis player. I'd be away for a month and come back with a tan but no one would ask me where I had been.' Patten enjoys playing on clay even if, in doubles, the surface meddles with rankings. No matter who emerges as the men's doubles champions in Paris, he would like sports fans to have dipped into watching it. 'Doubles players really get emotional,' he says. 'I think Harri is a great example of that. Almost every match, he's going crazy. There are lots of moments that kind of go missing, but that's why people watch sport — to have that emotion and connection.'
The Guardian
20-05-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
‘Doubles is absolute carnage': meet Henry Patten, GB's unsung Wimbledon champion
It's slightly unusual to hear Henry Patten – along with Harri Heliövaara, reigning men's doubles champion at Wimbledon and the Australian Open – call tennis a 'fun hobby'. But then you spend time in his company and realise he is slightly unusual. Patten, 29, was not supposed to be a professional, never mind a grand slam winner. Though he played county level as a child, he enjoyed various sports as a teenager before a tennis scholarship to Culford School in Suffolk – 'I don't know how we weasled that!' – inspired him to attend college in North Carolina, where he read economics. 'We'd have two hours' training in the afternoon, a foreign concept to me,' he says. 'That was where I learned how to be a professional without really understanding what was happening, because I was having a good time.' Patten, a late developer missed at every level, evidences a flawed system. Though he acknowledges that 'It's pretty tough to see a hundred 12-year-olds and say which'll be a champion', even when he excelled in the US, no one paid attention: 'I came home and the first professional event, someone from the LTA came up and said 'Who are you?' I didn't know how to take that.' So he agreed to join Ernst & Young as a technology risk consultant, but was saved by the pandemic, doing well enough in bubble events for family to insist he pursued tennis seriously: 'Thank goodness they talked me around otherwise I wouldn't be sitting here. A friend works at EY and he's absolutely miserable, whereas any time I'm upset or struggling, I can play tennis. It completely engrosses you and takes your mind off whatever else is going on.' Patten's calm sense of perspective is striking, but a debut grand slam final is of a palpably different order – especially for an unseeded, unknown Brit in SW19. 'The first time we played Wimbledon I was trying to act like I wasn't nervous at all, and we lost very quickly, so now I let the nerves be there,' he says. 'But this time I couldn't stop smiling, it's the coolest thing ever. Walking down the corridor, past the trophies and underneath the Kipling quote, it feels like the absolute pinnacle of anything.' Emerging to a crowd, though, is different – 'You want that moment to last forever, don't really want to start playing tennis' – and as the contest intensified into an unfathomable epic, the atmosphere became equally feverish. 'The whole way we were clinging on desperately,' Patten tells me, 'so I didn't feel much pressure until the last point, and Harri hit a great first serve – I didn't even touch the ball.' After which, mayhem. 'What was amazing was I had everyone in my box,' Patten says, 'and they all had the same face on that I had on … the craziest, best feeling ever, a home crowd going completely ballistic, everyone's just absolutely nuts. To create those emotions in people, it's an absolute honour.' In Melbourne, five months later, it was Patten tasked with settling another classic: 'I felt a lot more pressure thinking blindly 'Serve it out, just it serve out.' I went completely blank so Harri came and said 'Your serve is great, serve here; I'm going to go here,' which usually the server would dictate. I served an ace and said, 'OK, now tell me how to serve on this one.' Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion Before teaming up with Finland's Heliövaara, Patten partnered fellow Briton Julian Cash, eventually realising that he had to be ruthless to progress: 'One of those difficult conversations you just have to have, and we had it. What's unusual is we're still friends and we've got seven Brits in the doubles top 50, which is unbelievable – it's a golden age.' Doubles, though, suffers from a chronic lack of funding, coverage and care, despite proof – exemplified by Patten's experiences – that people love it. 'It's a team sport, so you've got different tactics,' he explains when asked to pitch it. 'You see a lot more variation in the shots – singles is mainly baseline rallies, but doubles has net-play with quick hands, it's absolute carnage. 'Singles, you have a pretty strong idea of who's going to win, whereas doubles, everything's out of the window … I know friends of years who split up and hate each other. Fundamentally, you're dealing with extremely, extremely competitive 30-year-old men who travel the world together – it's a recipe for disaster!' Patten also has a vision for change, citing padel as an example. 'There's always a good energy. Most sports, the spectacle is great but it's really about being with friends and having a nice time, so you could turn doubles into something different, with music and free crowd movement. Doubles has a great chance of becoming this unique, fun event … if the authorities let it.'
South Wales Argus
30-04-2025
- Sport
- South Wales Argus
Patten scoops prestigious tennis award after maiden Grand Slam victory
The 28-year-old was honoured at the tenth anniversary of the awards which were held at the National Tennis Centre in Roehampton. The Colchester-native partnered Finnish Harri Heliovaara to lift his first major title at his home Slam and won three ATP titles in the same year. He took victories in Marrakech, Lyon and Stockholm, helping him to his first call-up for the Davis Cup where he claimed his first victory representing Great Britain against Canada. "Last year was incredible. Especially winning Wimbledon with my partner, Harri Heliovaara, in front of a home crowd was like a dream,' Patten reflected. "I was also honoured to represent my country in the Davis Cup - an experience I'll never forget. "I'd like to thank my coach Calvin and my family for their endless support - without whom none of this would be possible. 'Lastly, thank you to all the fans who have supported me on my journey. I can't wait to play on home turf again this year - see you all in the summer." The annual LTA Tennis Awards, presented by Lexus, highlight and celebrate the incredible achievements and contributions of people in tennis across Britain. First launched in 2015 with the help of former LTA president Cathie Sabin OBE, they recognise the vital work of volunteers, coaches, officials, and players dedicating their precious time and energy to the continual development and growth of the sport. Over the past ten years, the awards have illustrated the depth of service and talent within the tennis community and serve as an inspiration to others to get involved in the game. The winners, selected from more than 2,000 nominations across 25 different categories, have all been acknowledged for their outstanding contribution to tennis in 2024. The awards were graced by the presence of tennis royalty as Sue Barker was on hand to present some of the accolades. 'It's great, I've been to the awards before so I know how important they are. It's great that the clubs get so involved and that the LTA supports the clubs because they are getting tennis out to all parts of the country,' said Barker. 'It's lovely that they can come here, be appreciated and also be inspired to go back and continue it, and get rewarded for all the hard work that they've done. 'It was lovely to see so many incredible people and hearing stories of what they've done, how they've changed people's lives. It was a very inspiring evening.' To find out more information about the LTA Tennis Awards, presented by Lexus or for information on how to play, coach, volunteer or officiate in tennis, head to: The Official Home of Tennis For Britain | LTA
