Canada's Felix Auger Aliassime looks dejected after his first-round match against Michael Mmoh of the U.S.DYLAN MARTINEZ/Reuters
There are few natural sights as majestic as a British sports crowd in the rain. First, you have to qualify what you mean by ‘rain.’ Is it sprinkling? Is it showering? Or is it raining?
On Monday, Canada’s Félix Auger-Aliassime began his Wimbledon under intermittent cloud in the ancestral home of weather.
There was a strong northerly wind whipping in on Court 12, but only sometimes. Other times it was very still. When the sun peeped out, it became hot in a hurry. Once the cloud moved back in, it was surprisingly cold.
The crowd was in a constant low roil as people got up to take off clothes, and then up again to put them back on, over and over.
Then it began to rain. Not much of a rain – what my mother might call a ‘wet rain’ – but a rain nonetheless.
The audience, several hundred people, were sitting there in T-shirts and sundresses. Not one of them reacted.
In Canada, this sort of precipitation would have sent people fleeing for cover. Not here. Rain didn’t stop Nelson and it’s not stopping them.
For a long moment – the length of two points – everyone continued on as if nothing were amiss.
The first person to break the spell was Auger-Aliassime. He finally threw up his arms in the universal gesture for ‘What are we doin’ here?’ Sitting under her tiny roof, the chair umpire asked what was up. Auger-Aliassime mimed going ass-over-teakettle with his hand. So the match stopped. For about five minutes.
The umpire came out to the middle of the court, crouched and gingerly patted the grass with her palms. Unsatisfactory. She went back up under her little roof and held her hands out like she was opening the Ark of the Covenant. No rain feel. The crowd still hadn’t moved. More people were actually piling in.
They restarted. Ten minutes after that, when it was genuinely not raining, the umpire pulled the plug. Rain on its way, apparently. For real this time.
Auger-Aliassime, a sneaky smile on his face, looked over at his team and pulled his hand gently across his throat – ‘See? I told them.’
Tarps came out over courts all across the grounds. The wind picked up again and showers blew through. But the crowd refused to cease wandering the paths or standing out in the open with their drinks. These tickets are hard to come by. Rain is not stopping anyone from extracting full value from them.
Few venues in the world are so intimately associated with their weather as this one. Every country thinks it has a monopoly on changeable conditions. Only here is it true. So much so that during the fortnight, the Met Office keeps a forecast specific to the All England Club. It was still wrong on Monday.
It can be cold (all-time low: 5C) or baking hot (all-time high: 35C). It nearly always rains (about one in 20 years is completely dry). Sometimes it really rains (the first Wimbledon on the current site, held in 1922, was so sopping that it finished a week late).
On one tournament day in 1985, it came down so hard, so suddenly that an inch of water fell in 20 minutes. That’s the sort of deluge that triggers flash floods.
Looking back at footage of that storm, it isn’t the truly biblical level of rain that impresses you. It’s the fact that a few dozen spectators remained in their seats throughout.
Rain features in a few great Wimbledon myths. Local favourite Tim Henman was going to win Wimbledon in 2001 – ask anyone, he was – until a rain delay. After a night to think about how things were going in his semi (really well), Henman decided to collapse instead.
“God wanted me to win this game,” the winner, Goran Ivanisevic, said afterward. “He sent the rains.”
Though there will 100 per cent be precipitation at some point, no one dresses properly for it. The Ur-Wimbledon fan image is a miserable, but also happy couple cowering together half-soaked under a single umbrella, presumably because one of them refused to believe that it can rain in England. I know you know which one.
On Monday, the weather undid Auger-Aliassime. Unforced errors might have also played a role. And the heavily taped knee. And the fact that he hadn’t played in over a month.
After a two-hour weather delay, Auger-Aliassime resumed against American Michael Mmoh.
Mmoh, the 119th ranked player in the world, only qualified by virtue of an injury to another player. He’s been a professional for seven years and has never really made a dent.
But perhaps it was down to each man’s usage of the break. Cameras in the players-only area caught Auger-Alliasime stretching vigorously with resistance bands. Meanwhile, Mmoh was off somewhere more private turning himself into Ivan Lendl.
Upon return, Mmoh didn’t dominate the Canadian. Instead, he refused to let the obvious thing – that the Canadian eventually would start to dominate him – happen.
Nearly six hours after they’d started, Auger-Aliassime appeared to give in. Only broken twice in four sets, Auger-Aliassime allowed himself to be broken again, and on a double fault, in a game that ended the match. It ended 7-6, 6-7, 7-6, 6-4 over the world No. 11. It’s the biggest upset of Mmoh’s career.
“I think just today it showed that I wasn’t really ready,” Auger-Aliassime said after it was done. After it ended, Mmoh dropped to his knees and kissed the grass. Some other man will lift a trophy in two weeks, but he had just won his own Wimbledon. It’s in moments like these that you get why this tournament matters so much. It is one of those rare events where just showing up can feel like a triumph.
We may have to wait a bit for more such moments. The Met forecasts some weather on Tuesday. Not sprinkles – “possibly thundery” rain.
Will that stop anyone from coming? Absolutely not.
Will any of them dress for it? What are you, new here?