Appy tennis fans
More than half a million spectators will pour through the turnstiles in south-west London this week, but that is just a small fraction of the number who will follow the action via the Wimbledon app, where point-by-point scores from every match on every court are available within seconds.
The app is an all-year-round platform for everything Wimbledon that is tailored to the needs of individual users, allowing fans to buy tickets, players to book re-strings for their rackets and, in the other 49 weeks of the year, All England Club members to book courts.
But there is, inevitably, a huge surge in “interactions” during the tournament proper – 18bn last year, from 21 million individual users – with more expected this time around – and a team of IBM technicians, in what they describe as their “bunker” in the bowels of the main admin building, is tasked with ensuring that the supply of information meets demand.
The current tournament also marks year one of what Fred Baker, sports lead for IBM Consulting EMEA, describes as a “complete rebuild” of the Wimbledon app and website, “redesigned from the ground up”.
“We’ve launched and enhanced key features,” Baker says, “like the live “likelihood to win”, which has an added feature for key moments and explains the turning points, and MatchChat, where fans can ask questions about a match as it’s progressing in real time.”
Some questions, though, remain off-limits. “There are some we don’t want to engage in,” Baker says. “If someone asks which player is dating which player, we’ll steer the person back on topic.”
Birds stop play
Pigeon problems are largely a thing of the past at Wimbledon, not least as a result of Rufus the Hawk’s sterling efforts in the field of avian deterrence over the last 18 years.
But the decline in the pigeon population appears to have opened up a niche for the smaller – and, let’s be honest, much classier – pied wagtail, several of which seem to have found nesting sites in the sliding roof mechanism of No 1 Court.
There was even a brief interruption to play during the first match on court on Thursday, as a busy parent with chicks to feed landed in the tramlines in the middle of a game, blissfully unaware that 12,000 spectators were watching Madison Keys preparing to serve just a few feet away.
Rockets fizzle out
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard broke a 15-year-old grand slam record here 12 months ago when he sent down a 153mph (246km/h) serve, eclipsing the mark of 148mph set by Taylor Dent in 2010, before predicting that “260 or 270km/h is maybe the next one.”
For the moment, though, his record seems safe, as Thiago Tirante (238km/h) and Ben Shelton (235km/h), the only players to serve faster than 232km/h so far this week, failed to make it into the second round, while Mpetshi Perricard managed only a relatively tame maximum of 229km/h in his first-round defeat to Yannick Hanfmann.
