Eighteen withdrawals aren't bad luck: they're a calendar that doesn't work

When a player pulls out of a tournament, the word almost always used is "bad luck." A misstep, a muscle that gives way, an injury that strikes at the worst possible moment. But when the withdrawals reach eighteen, eight women and ten men, before a single ball has even been struck, we stop talking about bad luck. We're talking about a system.

Wimbledon 2026 opens with the longest list of absentees in years. And the temptation to dismiss it as a coincidence is strong, because a coincidence forces no one to change. The thesis of this article is simple and uncomfortable: the switch from clay to grass, built the way it is today, breaks players with a regularity that has nothing random left about it.

Three weeks to change sport

The problem isn't the grass. The problem is the speed with which you reach it.

Roland Garros ends in early June. Wimbledon begins three weeks later. In between lies the most abrupt technical leap on the tennis calendar: from the slowest surface, where the foot slides in a controlled way and rallies last, to the fastest, where lateral movement changes its very nature and one wrong step becomes a fall. Anyone who knows this sport knows it isn't about adjusting a few details. It is, in practice, about changing sport for a few weeks.

Three weeks to reprogram the muscles, the footwork, the timing. For pure clay-courters it's almost a mission impossible, and the numbers have said so for years: the slides, and the injuries that come from them, return like clockwork every grass season. This is nothing new. It's the part of the calendar that everyone knows is fragile, and that no one fixes.

The names behind the statistic

A list of withdrawals risks staying abstract. So let's look at it up close, because the individual cases tell the story better than any theory.

Tomas Machac gave in after tests showed that the foot tear he picked up at Roland Garros itself couldn't withstand the prospect of grass. Lorenzo Musetti, already forced to skip Paris with a rectus femoris problem, didn't recover in time. Victoria Mboko, world number nine, ended her grass season early after a fall and a knee injury at Queen's. Emma Raducanu turned a niggle she had been managing for weeks into a stress fracture. Mattia Bellucci stopped because of a training setback. And above them all remains Carlos Alcaraz, away from the courts since April with his wrist.

These are different stories, with different causes. But the timing isn't different: they all arrive in the bottleneck between clay and grass, the one moment of the year when the body has to reinvent itself without respite. When the same point in the calendar produces the same kind of casualties every year, the explanation is no longer an individual one.

The objection, and why it isn't enough

There's a legitimate counterargument, and it's right to face it rather than ignore it. Injuries, one might say, are part of the sport. Tennis is a high-impact sport, ankles and knees always pay a price, and a certain number of withdrawals is unavoidable at any Slam. True. No one is claiming that a perfect calendar would eliminate injuries.

But there's a difference between background noise and a signal. An isolated injury is noise. Eighteen withdrawals clustered in the same gap, year after year, are a signal. The grass season lasts only a few weeks, the shortest and the densest, squeezed between two months of clay and the American hard-court summer. It's no accident that it's also the riskiest. The system asks bodies to go from the slowest surface to the fastest in the minimum amount of time, and then acts surprised when the bodies break down.

What it really means

The price isn't paid only by the player who stops. It's paid by the tournament, which loses its protagonists before it even begins. It's paid by the spectator, who buys a ticket to see champions who won't take the court. It's paid by the very idea of the Slam as the highest expression of the sport, hollowed out when half the expected names are in the stands with ice packs.

Lengthening the transition, rethinking the density of the calendar, giving players the time to switch surface without breaking apart: these are possible choices, not laws of nature. The grass season is short by tradition, but tradition is no alibi for ignoring a problem that recurs with the punctuality of a clock.

Eighteen withdrawals aren't bad luck. They're the bill, delivered right on time, for a calendar we keep pretending not to see.