Preview: 2025 Wheelchair Championships, Wimbledon
When wheelchair singles draws were introduced at The Championships at Wimbledon in 2016 the third Grand Slam of the year was the only grass court tournament on the UNIQLO Wheelchair Tennis Tour.
Things have evolved considerably since then and for the first time this year the Lexus Eastbourne Open and the Lexus British Open Roehampton were both designated ITF 1 Series status on the UNIQLO Wheelchair Tennis Tour to give players enhanced competitive opportunities to acquaint themselves with grass before they arrive at SW19, where play begins on Tuesday.
This year’s tournament in Eastbourne saw Ruben Spaargaren and Angelica Bernal both land their first grass court singles titles. But how much the results have a bearing on what is to come in the men’s and women’s draw this week at Wimbledon remains to be seen, with Bernal and Spaargaren then losing out in the first round in Roehampton - Spaargaren exiting the Lexus British Open draw to world No.4 Gustavo Fernandez, the player he’d beaten just days earlier in the Eastbourne final.
Fernandez and Aniek van Koot – conqueror of Bernal in the first round in Roehampton - both went on to finish runners-up in Roehampton to Alfie Hewett and Yui Kamiji, respectively.
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Reigning champion Hewett bids to become just the second player since the now-retired Stefan Olsson, in 2017 and 2018, to win back-to-back men’s singles titles at The Championships, with Fernandez, Joachim Gerard, Gordon Reid and Tokito Oda all hoping to add their names to the roll of honour for the second time.
Oda and Stephane Houdet are the only two players in the men’s top 10 to have elected not to play in either Eastbourne or Roehampton in their preparations for the third Grand Slam of the year.
Maybe one of the first questions to ponder before play begins at the All England Club on Tuesday, is whether anyone can stop Oda and Hewett, the world’s top two men’s players, from contesting their third Grand Slam final of 2025.
In the women’s singles, Diede de Groot’s eight-month absence from competitive tennis until early May has created a landscape that saw Kamiji return to the world No.1 ranking after clinching her third Australian Open title at the end of January.
2022 Wimbledon runner-up Kamiji arrives in SW19 with just the most coveted of all grass court titles needed to complete her career Grand Slam.
The manner of Kamiji’s 6-0 6-4 victory over world No.2 Van Koot In the British Open final suggests she could be primed to lift her first Wimbledon title. But her win over De Groot in a final set tie-break in their quarter-final and a close first set in her semi-final against world No.4 Wang Ziying are also a reminder – if ever one was needed - that there are many challenges to overcome if she is to continue her unbeaten Grand Slam tournament record this season.
Including May’s BNP Paribas World Team Cup, De Groot is now five tournaments in to her comeback to competitive wheelchair tennis after her rehab from the hip surgery she underwent soon after the Paris 2024 Paralympics. The Tram Barcelona Open, her first tournament after the World Team Cup, signalled a triumphant return to the UNIQLO Wheelchair Tennis Tour with the Lexus Eastbourne Open her only other singles final since then.
Does De Groot’s thrilling quarter-final encounter with Kamiji in Roehampton and the release in recent days of a documentary series on Team NL channels charting De Groot’s comeback suggest that the reigning Wimbledon champion and current world No.5 is primed in her bid to making it five Wimbledon titles in a row? Maybe. Time will tell.
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Then there is the small matter of the Chinese challenge.
For the first time in Grand Slam history there were four Chinese players in the women’s singles draw at The Championships last year – among them 2024 semi-finalist Wang Ziying, who eventually bowed out in the semi-finals to De Groot.
Meanwhile, as well as having the distinction of ending De Groot’s 145-match winning streak in May 2024, Li Xiaohui has twice beaten Kamiji in Super Series singles finals this season, becoming the first Chinese player to win a Super Series singles title within wheelchair tennis. Li subsequently beat De Groot in the first round of this year’s Roland Garros draw.
Li is one of two players in this year’s Wimbledon entries who were among the first wheelchair players to receive grants last year from the Grand Slam Player Development Programme (GSPDP). The other is Israel’s Sergei Lysov, who made his Grand Slam debut at Roland Garros last month and makes his Wimbledon debut this week.
Lysov will surely aspire to achieve the kind of success enjoyed by his countryman Guy Sasson, who arrives in London for his second Wimbledon Championships hoping to improve on last year’s singles semi-final and doubles final berth.
Winner of the last two Roland Garros quad singles titles, Sasson is arguably the player most likely to end the three-year sequence of Dutch quad singles champions at The Championships.
World No.2 Sam Schroder, the 2022 champion, and two-time defending champion and world No.1 Niels Vink, have shared the last three Wimbledon quad singles titles between them and have gone head-to-head in two of the last three Wimbledon finals.
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Vink’s victory on the grass at the Lexus British Open included a resounding 6-0 6-2 semi-final victory over Sasson and a 6-1 4-6 6-3 victory over Schroder, suggesting that the 22-year-old is in confident mood ahead of the start of his title defence,
Schroder, meanwhile, has had something of an inconsistent lead-in to Wimbledon after losing out in the Eastbourne semi-finals to Britain’s Andy Lapthorne for the second successive year and then saving a match point and coming from a set and 5-0 down to defeat British No. 2 Greg Slade in the semi-finals in Roehampton.
Schroder’s British Open final against Vink suggested an improved performance, but Lapthorne Slade, Sasson, Turkiye’s world No.4 Ahmet Kaplan, Chile’s Francisco Cayulef and South Africa’s Donald Ramphadi are all capable of pouncing on any signs if fragility from the two top ranked players.