Womens Tennis

Ok, so the year is ending and there is we are all thinking about Christmas, the Boxing day sport, the holidays, and the Aussie Open.

Each year, mostly around Wimbledon, the tennis world opens up the can of worms called 'equal prize money'. Both the French and Australian Opens pay a slightly smaller amount to the ladies than the men, while the US Open was the first of the Major tournaments to offer the ladies equal prize money for winning the tournament. However, I would really like to challenge that, because, for me, it is not equal at all, and i like that the All England tournament had different prize money for the mens and the ladies tournaments. Why? Well let me out line it for you.

Firstly at the four Grand Slam events, the men play best of 5 sets, while the ladies play best of 3. i looked at the court time for the Wimbeldon 2007 of the two winners, Roger Federer and Venus Williams.
Williams had a shaky start to the tournament. However, she won all but two of her 7 games with in 2 sets. Taking a total of 642 minutes of court time.
Federer Also won all but two of his games by the quickest way method, but he only played 6 games due to an injury to Tommy Haas. His total tournament time was 747 minutes. So on average he spent 123 minutes per match, while Venus to about 92minutes.

Okay, so this is just a slice of the pie. The arguement can be made that Venus and Federer aren't a good test, however, Venus was under performing early, with two of her first three games going to three sets, and those two took about 2 hours each. However as federer went on his games took longer, meaning more competition. The vibe that I get from both the mens and womens is that the sets are closer, the court time per male player and female player is much different, easily the extra third that the above stats resulted in.

So why equal money. Equity, rather than equality. I would like to see the ladies have to play the full five sets to receive their equal prize money. Will it happen? I doubt it


LINKS
- "Wimbeldon to offer Equal Prize Money" Press Release from the All England Club
- "Wimbledon To Maintain Prize-Money Gender Gap" - New York Times, Robin Finn, 30 April 1999
- Venus Williams matches at Wimbeldon 2007
- Roger Federer matches at Wimbeldon 2007