Want a last minute ticket to Wimbledon? No problem. Just get in line.
Standing in the famous Wimbledon ticket queue, Tom O’Neill and Roz McArdle had little hope of entering the grounds. It was 5.30pm on Wednesday, there were 4,000 people in front of them and they were told by a flight attendant that it was “tremendously unlikely” that they would go in.
But they, and hundreds of others, clung to the tiniest glimmer of hope that they would see at least one game in the citadel of tennis, constantly creeping along the winding line.
“We might as well try,” McArdle said. “We left work around 4 and got here around 5. If we don’t make it, we might come back on Friday.”
They did what people have been doing for over a century: they joined a queue that snakes through an adjacent golf course and down Church Road to a ticket office, where anyone, some of whom have been queuing for more than 24 hours, can buy one. buy ticket, for that day only, to attend the most famous tennis tournament in the world.
“It’s totally worth it,” said Shreyas Dharmadhikari, a lawyer from Jabalpur in central India. “It’s a pilgrimage you make for the love of tennis, for the love of Wimbledon.”
With a capacity of around 42,000 for the ground, Wimbledon sells tickets months in advance through a public voting system, allocating some tickets to tennis clubs and people living near the All England Club, and in other selected ways. It’s one of the hardest tickets to get in the sport, but the tournament offers thousands of tickets to the public every day, if they’re willing to wait hours for them.
The queue is one of the longest, old-fashioned checkout lines in the world, the sports equivalent of the infamous Studio 54 line, but much older.
On Wednesday, Dharmadhikari brought his son, Arjun, who was wearing a sticker handed out by stewards that read, “I was queuing in the rain.” They were given cards numbered 11,466 and 11,477 and waited 5 ½ hours to get in and were thrilled to see several matches and eat strawberries with whipped cream.
But on Monday, some people waited almost twice as long under periodic bursts of sustained rain for a disastrous opening day for the queue. Tournament organizers blamed the delays, which slowed the pace of the queue to a crawl, on heightened security scrutiny over the threat of a climate protest.
The threat became a reality on Wednesday when two protesters ran onto the No. 18 lane and flipped over a box of orange confetti. The protesters were quickly led away and the game resumed – but only after another rain delay in a tournament they had been plagued with. After weeks of virtually no rainfall in London, it rained intermittently during the first three days of the tournament, wreaking havoc on the schedule and in the waterlogged queue.
But even without special conditions, the queue can be a long (sometimes over a mile), exhausting, adventurous, wet, fun and uniquely British institution.
Two schoolboys, Simon, 10, and his brother Stefano, 8, quietly read comic books while they waited on Wednesday, hoping to see their favorite player, Italian 21-year-old Jannik Sinner, who beat Argentina’s Diego Schwartzman in straight sets on court no. 1.
“We waited maybe two hours,” Simon said, and his brother asked, “Do you think we’ll make it?”
About an hour later, a flight attendant announced to a group somewhere in the middle of the line that there were 1,600 people ahead of them and that he had been informed by a ticket manager that only 250 more tickets would be released. Sobs of disbelief and disappointment rang out from the group, but no one left immediately.
“How you receive this information is entirely up to you,” said the flight attendant, who went to great lengths to order everyone to go home.
That wouldn’t have been easy for Danielle Payten and her husband, David Payten, who flew from Sydney, Australia with their three children. They took no risk of being kept out of the daily queue by doing what hundreds do every day. They camped overnight in tents.
The tent area, where spectators spend the night to ensure they have a good place in line the next day, is the more festive part of the queue: people play football, cards, cricket or read and drink cocktails. On Wednesday afternoon, the sun broke through, prompting young men in line to take off their shirts to spontaneously sunbathe.
“It’s like a carnival atmosphere,” said a steward, who declined to be named because they are not allowed to talk to reporters.
The Paytens arrived at 3:30 pm and met some people from the neighboring tents, one of whom had a dog. They talked, ate and drank as they prepared for a cricket match later that night on a patch of flat grass. Danielle’s brother, Chris Kearsley, who lives in London, arrived early to pitch three tents for them (only two people per tent get tickets). His daughter, Eliza Kearsley, lives a 15-minute walk from the same mystical location that her relatives have traveled 10,000 miles to find.
She stopped by to see her family, as neither she nor her father planned to go to camp and the next day’s games.
“If I had stayed one night I would have been too drunk to go in,” joked Chris Kearsley.
But with only about 200 people for their group, the Australian cousins were all but guaranteed entry to Thursday’s games.
“It’s well worth it,” said David Payten. “It’s an adventure.”
A traveler from Japan, planning to stay for most of the two weeks of the tournament, brought a portable solar-powered washing machine.
Maria Balhetchet, a professional violinist from Dorset in southern England, and Felix Bailey, her tennis-playing son, arrived at 12.30pm on Wednesday, targeting Thursday’s action. They got card No. 101, which meant there were only 100 people for it. Balhetchet camped out with her other son last year, and although they scored third-row tickets to an explosive match between eventual men’s singles finalist Nick Kyrgios and Stefanos Tsitsipas, the experience was exhausting overall. Moisture seeped into the tent, she couldn’t sleep, and she vowed never to do it again.
But there she was Wednesday.
“It’s like giving birth,” she said. “You go through it and say, ‘Never again’, but then of course you want to.”
They were willing to wake up at 6am on Thursday (after queuing for nearly 18 hours). Campers are given 30 minutes to break down their tents and place them in daily storage, then line up and wait another four hours for the gates to open. Some people, after watching the tennis, go back to the park, get their tents and get back in line – hence the need for the washing machine.
Among those still hoping to get involved on Wednesday was a group of teenage tennis players from the Time To Play Tennis Academy in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. Their coach, Doug Robinson, said the group flew from Harare to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia and then on to London, where they hoped to see Wimbledon live and then play some matches in England.
Late Wednesday afternoon, they were still far behind in line. The children sat on the floor chatting and Robinson surveyed the situation.
“It doesn’t look too good from here,” he said. ‘But it’s Wimbledon. You have to seize the opportunity.”