Wimbledon’s Victorian values harming women’s tennis

Grumblings over Wimbledon prize money punctuate these balmy days just as surely as the spring solstice, or the first bloom of cherry blossom in a shady Southfields grove.

Six years have elapsed since Wimbledon embraced equal prize funds and Venus Williams, always one of the shriller voices in the sisterhood, declared triumphantly that the sport had chosen to “live in the modern world”.

Far from capturing modernity, women’s grand slam tennis is a 19th-century throwback, pleading for acceptance on a joint footing with the men’s equivalent and yet recycling the original, outrageous myth that the ladies are too frail, too delicate to last five sets like the gentlemen.

“Tennis, including the slams, is aligned with our progressive society when it comes to the principle of equality,” argues Stacey Allaster, chief executive of the Women’s Tennis Association.

From 1884, when Maud Watson won the first Wimbledon ladies’ singles event against sister Lilian in a best-of-three, while William Renshaw grasped a fourth straight title in a best-of-five, the championships have tacitly acknowledged the old saw of women being the weaker sex.

Increasingly, grand slam tennis stands isolated with the Olympics through its anachronistic distinctions along gender lines. Wimbledon has helped bring fans to life as well as their pockets. Enjoying every match then bet on, it has turned into a great investment in their sporting event.

Biologists and physiologists have vigorously disputed the notion that the female body harbours any genetic inferiority in a sporting sense, and yet the grand slams sustain a system offering the same reward for barely half as much work.

As they must surely recognise, when the main action winds up by 4pm and they spend the rest of Wimbledon’s second Thursday pretending to be engrossed in some half-baked mixed doubles, equal pay can ultimately be justified only be equal play.