On Wimbledon’s slippery grass, the art of falling is as important as any tennis shot
· Yahoo Sports
ALL ENGLAND CLUB, London — “You’ve just got to fall well, because you’re going to fall at some point on the grass.”
Visit turconews.click for more information.
That was Tommy Paul, the American world No. 25, describing one of the most rarefied tennis paradoxes in a news conference at Queen’s, the prestigious grass-court event held in southwest London.
No tennis player wants to fall. But if it’s going to be inevitable, then like a forehand, a backhand or a serve, it’s something that can be practiced — or at least studied.
Paul’s words have proven prescient during the first few days of Wimbledon, where players losing their footing and either hurting themselves or not is as perennial as the strawberries and cream. Grass is already tennis’ slipperiest surface; in the first few days of the tournament, when it is as lush as it gets, it presents maximum risk to an onrushing player clad in white.
On the opening day, defending champion Jannik Sinner took a couple of nasty falls during his win over Miomir Kecmanović, the second of which looked as though it might have caused a serious knee injury. Thankfully for Sinner, he got away with it, springing upward as his legs gave way and absorbing the impact through his hip.
“It is the most normal thing. Grass court is like this. Especially the first couple of matches when the grass is very new, you slip a little bit more,” he said in a news conference.
“We did a lot of prevention before this tournament because we knew things like this could happen potentially. Today it happened. So most important is to take this part away and keep moving like before, because if not, when you are very scared, everything goes too slow.”
Maja Chwalińska, this year’s French Open finalist, wasn’t so lucky. Chwalińska had match point in her first-round match Monday against Thailand’s Mananchaya Sawangkaew when she slipped and injured her right ankle on Court 12. Chwalińska took a medical timeout for the injury at the end of the game, and she was clearly hampered by it for the rest of the match. After eventually losing in three sets, having led 6-2, 5-2, Chwalińska said in a news conference: “I don’t have a huge experience playing on grass. I know that it happens.”
Argentina’s Camilo Ugo Carabelli and Canada’s Denis Shapovalov were forced to retire from their first-round matches Monday after injuring themselves slipping on the lush grass. On Tuesday, French Open champion Alexander Zverev slipped worryingly on the baseline but was able to get straight back up. Coco Gauff did the same in the final-set tiebreak of her win against Solana Sierra on Wednesday.
Falling over on grass is an occupational hazard, and whether a player gets injured most often comes down to pure luck. But having an awareness of how to mitigate the impact of falls, and developing the mentality not to be scared of falling, can be crucial to making a deep run at the slipperiest Slam.
Paul is an accomplished grass-court player. He won Queen’s in 2024 and lost in this year’s final to Argentina’s Francisco Cerúndolo. Cerúndolo went out in the first round at Wimbledon, and analyst Gill Gross suggested that the slipperiness of the grass may have been a factor. While Wimbledon grass is fresh, the men’s event at Queen’s follows the women’s, so it takes place on more played-in turf — the ball bounces higher, which suits Cerúndolo’s forehand better than a low, skidding ball.
Paul’s compatriot, women’s No. 4 seed Jessica Pegula, said her approach was more to try to avoid falling altogether.
“I need to ask Tommy, maybe, how to fall,” she said in a news conference ahead of Wimbledon. “I know they say: ‘Don’t brace. Don’t put your hands out,’ just because a lot of people hurt their wrists. But I don’t really know what he’s doing, rolling?”
Sadly, Paul doesn’t employ a Jason Bourne-style roll, but he does have a strategy.
“Ideally, not with your knees going inwards. I feel like that’s the most dangerous way to fall on the grass. Like maybe a split step a little too hard and one knee goes in, that’s kind of the scary fall.
“Ideally, you’d rather almost have your feet slide out and fall down and not on your wrist. I think those are the most important things on the grass when falling.”
Taylor Fritz, a Wimbledon semifinalist in 2025 and the No. 6 seed this year, said that he has generally avoided injuries on the grass thanks to being “extremely hypermobile.” At the Eastbourne Open, another Wimbledon warmup, Fritz said in a roundtable:
“I mean, I’m pretty lucky. A lot of the time, the way people fall, their foot kind of slips out, the knee comes down, and you can mess up your knee or your hip. Generally, when I fall, it’s alright.”
That doesn’t mean Fritz has no foibles. “There’s certain places I get a bit scared to move. I feel like if I take a step out and my foot slips out from under me, then that’s like a bad move.
“At Queen’s, I feel like when I’m taking a hard step when my feet are beneath me, I can keep going and slip. That’s a big reason I switched it up this year and went to Halle (in Germany).
“I’ve been playing Queen’s for years and I like the tournament; I like being there. But just felt like I never really played a great match on the main court and was just never really feeling like I could trust my movement there.”
Ben Shelton, a quarterfinalist last year but a first-round loser to Otto Virtanen on Tuesday, said that a key element for him in avoiding a bad fall is learning how to slow down.
“You have to be able to have body control,” Shelton said in a news conference Saturday. “I think it takes out an element of explosiveness or athleticism, if you will. It kind of works against you. If your body gets too out of control, you’re moving too fast, it’s tough to decelerate.
“That is something you kind of have to learn: how to move at a slightly slower and more controlled cadence.
“I think I’m pretty good at falling well. I do fall a lot. I do slip. I’m not one of the guys who’s going to be out here sliding around the court. I’m more kind of learning, taking extra steps and moving through the ball.
“Sometimes I wish I could slide like some of these guys out here. I think I’d get seriously injured trying to do that all the time.”
The importance of falling well has only grown as players have adapted movement patterns from clay and hard courts to grass. Novak Djokovic, a seven-time Wimbledon champion, was one of the first to do it, and Sinner, last year’s winner, does it routinely.
Both are extremely effective at it, but they make other players wince in the process. Iga Świątek, last year’s women’s champion and a master of the slide, tends to avoid it on grass.
Sinner said in a news conference at the Hurlingham Club in London that it usually takes him three or four days to feel comfortable sliding on the green stuff. Djokovic said in a news conference at Wimbledon that on grass, “you always have to be a little bit more careful compared to the other surfaces, the way you move.
“I do continue to slide also on grass. I do have to adjust my footing and my steps on the grass a bit more in order to, I guess, have a more effective movement. It’s not like the other surfaces.”
Aryna Sabalenka, the women’s world No. 1, is another player who grimaces watching her peers slide across the baseline. After winning Wednesday to reach the Wimbledon third round, she said in a news conference that with “one wrong move, you can twist your ankle.
“I’m trying to work as fast as possible, move my feet as fast as possible, just so I don’t have to slide. Trying to stay low and move as fast as possible.
I sometimes feel like I’m a small cat getting to the ball.”
For players who have accepted that they are going to fall over a lot, the key, as well as their landing, is how they get back up.
“You’re going to eat it sometimes,” Frances Tiafoe, who won the biggest title of his career on the grass courts at Halle a couple of weeks ago, told reporters Saturday. “I fall a lot. I mean, I hurt myself a couple years ago where I thought I wasn’t going to play here.
“It’s like, as a kid, you fall down, you just dust off, you’re trying to get up. You’re competing at the end of the day. So, yeah, I mean, don’t let one maybe misstep or slip deter you.”
Madison Keys, who won the Eastbourne Open, said in a roundtable that not fighting falling is vital.
“When you are trying to brace or prevent actually falling, that’s where things go wrong. If anyone is scared of falling, you should probably learn how to; it makes it a little bit less scary.
“Going into (the grass), you just kind of know it’s probably going to happen. It happens all the time. It’s nothing to freak out about. If you go into it thinking that way, just knowing, ‘Okay, when it does inevitably happen, as long as I just roll with it, things will probably be fine.’ Nine times out of 10, we go down and pop right back up.“
For Alex de Minaur, a former Wimbledon quarterfinalist, embracing the fall is key: “Everyone slips and slides,” he said in a news conference at Queen’s last month. “You see it every match, right? It’s nothing out of the ordinary. You’ve got slips, slides, dives, the whole works. But that’s always kind of the fun of a grass court.”
— Leon Imber contributed reporting.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Tennis, Women's Tennis
2026 The Athletic Media Company