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Six awesome Wimbledon facts

by · 23/06/2014

Wimbledon, tennis, facts, knowledge, balls, strawberries, cream, serena williams, venus williams, goran ivanisevic, taylor dent, punnet, Isner, Mahut, 70-68Every year, Wimbledon rolls around to a roar of excitement from the thousands that come to watch the only Grand Slam event to be played on grass. One of the oldest tournaments on the tour, here are some things you might not know about Wimbledon.

1. There are a whopping 54,250 tennis balls used over the Wimbledon fortnight. They are stored at 20 degrees Celcius (68 degrees Fahrenheit). Yellow balls were used for the first time in 1986.

2. Tennis fans love to eat and drink. Over the two weeks, 300,000 cups of tea and coffee are served, 25,000 bottles of champagne, 32,000 fish and chip meals, 200,000 glasses of Pimm’s and, of course, 28,000kg of strawberries, covered in 7,000 litres of cream.

3. The Centre Court roof has been the subject of many a discussion, not least as a method of deterring Sir Cliff Richard from getting out his microphone. It sits 16m above the court, takes ten minutes to close and weighs 3,000 tonnes. To keep the fans and players cool, 143,000 litres of air is pumped in every second. A cheaper option, the roof cost a reported £80m, might have been to have bought 7,500 umbrellas , which would cover the same area.

4. Who’s the fastest of them all? Taylor Dent holds the record for the fastest Wimbledon serve, clocking 238 kph (148 mph) in 2010. The women’s record is held by Venus Williams who fired down a 207 kph (129 mph) serve two years earlier. In terms of aces, Goran Ivanisevic holds the all-time record with 212 in 2001 while Venus’ sister Serena is the joint record holder with Alexandra Stevenson with 57 in a single tournament.

5. The longest ever tennis match took place in 2010 as John Isner ran out a 6-4 3-6 6-7 7-6 70-68 winner against Nicholas Mahut. The game lasted 11 hours and five minutes, beating the previous record by over half and hour. Strangely, Mahut actually won more points (502 to 478) but ultimately lost the match, having seen 113 aces fly past him.

6. The price of a bowl of strawberries and cream has stood at £2.50 since 2010. The price has risen by between 5p and 25p in eight of the last 20 years, with one drop in price in 1999. There has to be at least 10 strawberries in a bowl.