Wimbledon Preview: Serena Williams is Back, Tech Takes Centre Court and More

Strawberries and cream. Freshly-mown grass courts. And maybe a rain delay or two.

It can only mean the return of Wimbledon.

The Championships, Wimbledon, is the oldest of the four tennis Grand Slams and the only one to be played on grass. Managed by The All England Lawn Tennis Club and staged on the AELTC Grounds, Wimbledon has evolved significantly from its debut in 1877, but it continues to set precedents in terms of player prize pots and technological innovations.

For nearly 150 years, Wimbledon has been synonymous with class and tradition. The 2026 event, running from June 29 through July 12, promises to be another captivating edition, highlighted by the return of a true sporting legend.

Contending: Sinner and Sabalenka

The fields in both the men’s and women’s singles draws look wide open this year as new stars emerge and established contenders battle injuries or recent struggles.

In the men’s draw, two-time Wimbledon champion Carlos Alcaraz will miss the event due to an ongoing wrist injury, leaving reigning winner (and world number one) Jannik Sinner as the betting favorite. Seven-time champion Novak Djokovic cannot be discounted even at the age of 39, while the likes of Taylor Fritz (of the United States), Ben Shelton (also from the U.S.) and Felix Auger-Aliassime (Canada) will be expected to make deep runs.

In the women’s draw, world number one Aryna Sabalenka goes in search of her long-awaited first Wimbledon title, ahead of former champions Elena Rybakina (Kazakhstan) and Iga Swiatek (Poland). American Jessica Pegula and newly minted French Open winner Mirra Andreeva make up the rest of the world’s top five players.

Injured: Alcaraz and Raducanu

The Championships have been hit by an almost unprecedented backlog of injuries in the build-up, leaving players questioning the congestion of the current tennis calendar.

Alcaraz is the most prominent absentee after also missing the French Open, while British hopeful Emma Raducanu dropped out on the eve of the tournament because of a stress fracture in her lower right leg.

Elsewhere, Italian Lorenzo Musetti, a semi-finalist in 2025, Norway’s Holger Rune and Americans Hailey Baptiste and Reilly Opelka will all be missing from the draw when the first round gets underway.

Some of those who have made it to the Wimbledon main draw have also only just recovered from long-term injuries (including Brit Jack Draper), while others have either decided to miss preparation tournaments altogether (Rafael Jodar, Joao Fonseca) or are still nursing injuries that will be assessed (e.g. Naomi Osaka).

These injuries may simply be down to bad luck, but the sheer number of them will be of concern to tour and event organizers. Seasons are becoming longer and increasingly grueling with more travel, and players seem to be feeling the effects.

Returning: Serena

At the age of 44, seven-time singles champion Serena Williams is officially back at Wimbledon. Returning to the singles court at the All England Club for the first time in four years after accepting a wildcard invitation to compete, she will also reunite with her sister Venus Williams in the women’s doubles event.

It means that Williams will become the second-oldest woman to compete in a Wimbledon singles main draw in the Open Era, behind only Martina Navratilova, who returned to SW19 after a 10-year gap in 2004 at the age of 47. Williams last won the event in 2016 and hasn’t won a match since 2019, when she lost in the final for the second consencutive year. She will open up in the first round on June 30 against Australia’s Maya Joint.

Banned: Vondroušová

While one former champion is making a big return to Wimbledon this year, one other former champion has been banned from participating.

Czechia’s Markéta Vondroušová, the women’s singles champion just three years ago, was recently banned from all levels of professional tennis for four years after it transpired that she had refused an anti-doping test in early December last year.

The athlete, who was charged by the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) for denying a doping control officer entry to her home for the test, said that the officer had failed to “follow protocol” and she had feared for her safety.

Prize Money Protests

Following similar displays at the French Open last month, some of the world’s top players promised to stage a protest over prize money at this year’s Wimbledon.

This year’s singles champions will earn £3.6 million ($4.75 million), and first-round losers can expect to receive £80,000 ($105,600). Players raised concerns that Wimbledon was allocating under 15 percent of its total revenues from the two-week championships to prize money.

In response, tournament organizers said that they were “surprised and disappointed” by the planned protests, stating that the player prize pots had already increased by 20 percent this year alone.

As in Paris, some players had planned to cut short their post-match press conferences to 15 minutes at Wimbledon as part of their protests. However, on the opening day of the Championships, it was announced that this boycott would no longer take place following discussions between players and organizers.

Video Review Technology

One year after electronic line calling was introduced at the All England Club, video review technology will be used at Wimbledon for the first time this year.

As is already the case at the U.S. Open and the Australian Open, players will now be able to challenge certain calls made by the chair umpire, if they are playing singles matches on any of the four show courts (including Center Court and Court One).

Although players cannot challenge the accuracy of the electronic line calling, they will be allowed to ask the chair umpire to review controversial decisions during matches, such as double ball bounces or balls touching players’ bodies.

They will also be able to request an unlimited number of reviews throughout a match.

Other Technological Innovations

The All England Lawn Tennis Club and IBM, the Official Partner and Official AI, Cloud, and Digital Transformation Partner of The Championships, announced new and enhanced digital fan features coming to Wimbledon this year.

The Wimbledon app and website have both been modernized and redesigned with AI-powered capabilities to engage the next generation of tennis fans.

A new Key Moments tool builds on the live Likelihood to Win feature, which continuously calculates each player’s probability of victory based on a comprehensive, AI-powered analysis of current and historical statistics, expert opinion and match momentum. It will now provide additional, richer information to explain which plays influence the direction of a single’s match and why.

Match Chat is an AI assistant that acts as an interactive companion for fans during a match. Rather than searching through statistics or navigating multiple screens, fans can use natural language and free text prompts to ask a question, such as: “What has happened in the match so far?”

Sourced from an expanded set of live match data, analysis and historical performance information, Match Chat will leverage a collection of AI agents and models, trained on Wimbledon’s editorial style and tennis language.

IBM Bob, an AI-powered development accelerator, was used to build a knowledge graph mapping content relationships and develop AI-driven workflows that translated the entire structure into the new platform. As a result, a mapping project that could traditionally require a team of four to five IBM specialists working for months was completed by a single engineer within four weeks, with the targeted 15,000 assets extracted in just 47 minutes.

The updates are designed to provide a more streamlined user journey and tailored experiences for audiences.

In 2025, AELTC reported that these efforts contributed to a 16 percent year-on-year increase in engagement across all platforms.

AI Sports Club Pop-Up

From July 2 through July 5 at Queen Stone on London’s South Bank, a fan-facing AI Sports Club pop-up will be open, combining Wimbledon and Scuderia Ferrari ahead of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone (July 5).

• An immersive Formula 1-style racing simulator called Hyperlap
• Calling the Shots, a proprietary table tennis experience that turns a physical game into a data-driven broadcast, both with your own personalized AI performance recap
• The Reaction Test for fans, which is designed to replicate the split-second decision-making required by Formula 1 drivers

It will all make for a memorable fortnight leading to the women’s singles final on July 11 and the men’s singles final the next day.

Tennis, anyone?