This week’s blog is slightly different and we have come up with twenty interesting facts about the Wimbledon tennis championships which are held every June/July at the All England Club.

1- During the Second World War a bomb destroyed over 1,200 seats on centre court
2- In 1995 Tim Henman was the first person to be disqualified from the men’s doubles after hitting a ball girl with a ball – he didn’t mean to though!
3- In 1875 the men’s winner, Spence Gore, received 12 guineas in prize money
4- Up until 1986 the tennis balls used at the championships each year were white, they were changed to yellow as they are more visible to television cameras
5- 102 decibels – the loudest grunt heard at Wimbledon by Maria Sharapova
6- The longest ladies final was two hours and forty five minutes in 2005 when Venus Williams defeated Lindsay Davenport
7- Around twenty three tonnes of strawberries are eaten each year at the Championships
8 – Forty miles of string are fitted to over two thousand rackets each year at the Championships
9 – Boris Becker was the youngest ever Men’s Champion when he won the title in 1985
10 – When Mark Philippoussis played Yevgeny Kafelnikov in 1998 the match was interrupted when a mouse ran on court
11 – The Brazilian player Maria De Amorin hit seventeen consecutive double faults in 1957
12 – 1988 was the first year when no wooden rackets were used at the Championships.
13 – Gertrude Hoahing, at four foot nine inches, is the shortest ever competitor at the Championships
14 – Each year over two hundred and fifty ball boys and girls are employed at the Championships and over fifty four thousand tennis balls are used
15 – 2007 was the first year when men and women both earned the same amount of prize money
16- Each year over twenty eight thousand kilograms of strawberries are eaten along with seven thousand litres of cream
17 – Mita Klima from Austria was the youngest ever player to compete in the tournament when she was just thirteen years old in
18 – Around five hundred thousand people attend the Championships each year
19 – To scare off the pigeons a hawk called Hamish flies over the ground at nine am each morning
20 – Only nine left handed players have ever won the Men’s or Ladies tennis championships

So how many of the above did you know? We hope you found them interesting and if you have any other random Wimbledon facts please let us know.