Giovanni's Boom
Mpetshi Perricard smashed records and took Taylor Fritz to the brink on Day 1 at Wimbledon.
WIMBLEDON, England — I hadn’t expected to spend so much time at the two main courts on Day 1 of Wimbledon, but two matches—in very different ways—went far beyond any reasonable expectations.
First, in the opening match on Centre Court, two-time defending champion Carlos Alcaraz found himself bafflingly battling into a fifth set against Fabio Fognini, a 38-year-old ranked 138th who had never made it past the third round here on 14 appearances in his long and unremarkable Wimbledon career.
Fognini had achieved big results elsewhere, but his only previously memorable Wimbledon moments were utterly ridiculous—either making idle bomb threats or performing the most memorably melodramatic line call protest of the century.
I’ve seen Fognini reach a glorious peak several times earlier in his career, often against Rafael Nadal, but this wasn’t it on Monday. Fognini had occasional flashes of strong shotmaking, but the match was competitive because Alcaraz was far, far off the level he’d shown the rest of this month, including in his memorable most recent five-setter.
Through four sets, Alcaraz had hit 43 winners against a whopping 59 unforced errors, and a major upset alert was sounding around the grounds.
But once they got into a fifth set, Alcaraz found his fight and his focus, and won the final frame easily to close out a 7-5, 6-7(5), 7-5, 2-6, 6-1 victory after more than four and a half hours.
Though he was not definitive, Fognini said afterward that the match was likely the last of his career, calling it “the right way to say goodbye.”
Rewriting the Record Book
The second show-stopping match on a show court took place on No. 1 Court, the stadium to which No. 5 Taylor Fritz and Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard were relocated after the first three matches on that court all ended in straight sets.
I had expected their match to be compelling and close—“Fritz-Mpetshi Perricard jumps out most, for me,” I wrote when the draw came out—but I didn’t expect it to be quite so staggering, and certainly not record-shattering.
In the very first point of the match, Mpetshi Perricard hit a first serve that was clocked at 149 mph. On the third point of the match, he hit a 153 mph body serve that Fritz somehow returned, and actually won the point with a forehand volley. Mpetshi Perricard closed his second service game with a 151 mph ace. He reached 152 mph in his third service game. In his fifth service game, he hit a 146 mph second serve.
It kept going: even in the fourth set when he could’ve been fatigued, Mpetshi Perricard reached 150 mph anew.
I was pretty sure, as saw as I saw the numbers coming in, that Mpetshi Perricard had to have set a record here. Sure enough, The Wimbledon Compendium, the tournament’s exceptionally exhaustive record book, showed that Mpetshi’s fastest had broken the previous Wimbledon record—Taylor Dent hitting 148 mph fifteen years ago—by a staggering five miles per hour.
For context of how off-the-charts this is, Fritz, one of the better servers on the ATP Tour, peaked at 136 mph on Monday. The second-fastest peak serve by any player at Wimbledon on Monday was 145 mph by Lloyd Harris.
According to IBM, Mpetshi Perricard’s previous fastest serve was 144.2 mph (232 km/h) at the Australian Open earlier this year.
Was the Radar Gun Trigger Happy?
Before I could get overly excited, I wanted to check with the All-England Club if this was indeed a new bona fide record.
“It is indeed,” AELTC Communications replied.
I thought it was important to check because, as you may recall, there was a false alarm about this record last year at Wimbledon, when a Ben Shelton serve that hadn’t looked exceptional popped up with a “153 mph” on the speed gun during his second round match, an assessment that was later overruled after some closer inspection.
When it happened, no one thought much of the serve in question except the speed gun, which posted 153 mph on its display after Shelton hit an unreturned serve against Lloyd Harris. There wasn’t much buzz about it though, which was odd for a record that normally gets people talking.
Watching the serve on video it quickly became clear why. It was far too slow. The serve, an ace out wide with some kick on it, was fast sure, but it wasn’t record-breaking fast.
After checking with IBM, which looks after such data for Wimbledon, a spokesperson explained that “one of [Shelton’s] serves was incorrectly recorded and displayed courtside as 153 mph. Following a review, this has been corrected to 132 mph.”
Serve records are often side-eyed because of perceived variability in measuring equipment (and previously because many courts didn’t have such technology, which is no longer the case anymore in this electronic era).
Most memorably, a possible-record-smashing serve by Sam Groth that was clocked at a crazy 163 mph at a Challenger in Korea in 2012 was viewed skeptically by many, and caused dispute even within the company that made the equipment, as my then-NYT colleague
memorably detailed.At first, a company employee, Stephen Parry, reported in an e-mail that after examining the data, the “serve speed reported by the FlightScope RacquetRadar sensor was incorrect in Korea” and that the actual serve speed was 153 m.p.h.
In a later e-mail, the FlightScope inventor Henri Johnson said that the service speed displayed in Busan was indeed correct. Parry later retracted his analysis, saying he had simply misread the data…
Groth was unaware of FlightScope’s internal debate, but well aware of the skepticism on tour.
“People have to make their own judgments on what they think,” Groth said. “The thing is for me, the ATP has said that they were happy that it was done with recognized equipment, and for me, I feel like I have that record.”
After Wimbledon’s verification to Bounces today, I wouldn’t expect Mpetshi Perricard’s numbers to be rolled back, but perhaps they will (and should) be scrutinized, too.
Nutty Numbers on the Scoreboard, Too
Beyond the radar gun, the Fritz-Mpetshi Perricard match was hugely nutty on the scoreboard and the stat sheet.
After twelve holds of serve, Fritz took a 6-4 lead in the first set tiebreak, and then lost the next four points as 36th-ranked Mpetshi Perricard took a 7-6(6) lead.
In the second set, Fritz lost just one point on serve in his six holds, and had a commanding 6-2 lead in the ensuing tiebreak, but Mpetshi Perricard erased the quadruple set point, then saved a fifth set point before extending his lead to 7-6(6), 7-6(8).
Fifth-seeded Fritz was on the verge of elimination and really had done barely anything wrong: through two sets, Fritz had hit 33 winners and just 5 unforced errors—a stark contrast to how Alcaraz had found himself in trouble hours earlier.
Fritz, who had failed to convert a break point in each of the first two sets, earned the first break of the match in the third set, which he won 6-4.
It looked like Mpetshi Perricard would wrap up the win in a fourth set tiebreak, taking a commanding 5-1 lead, but this time it was Fritz’s turn to turn the tables, reeling off five points in a row to pull ahead.
Mpetshi Perricard saved the first set point, but when he was serving at 6-6 to set up a match point, Mpetshi Perricard then hit what was surely the most powerful double fault in recorded history, missing first and second serves that clocked at 145 mph and 141 mph, respectively.
Fritz won the set, but before the crowd could get too excited, a tournament official came on to suggest that the players stop play.
There were still 44 minutes left before the local 11 p.m. curfew, which could’ve been enough time to finish a set, but the official seemed to favor stopping, and Mpetshi Perricard did, too, over Fritz’s objections.
“They would’ve let us play if my opponent agreed to,” Fritz later wrote in an Instagram comment. “I said I wanted to; he didn’t.”
And so the two will return to No. 1 Court tomorrow afternoon for a one-set shootout.1
Though he wanted to play on, I think it should help Fritz that the roof will be open for the conclusion; Mpetshi Perricard has a much better record indoors than outdoors, and giving his shoulder some time to cool off can’t hurt.
It will give everyone some time to calm down, really. Fritz’s well-known girlfriend Morgan Riddle rarely emotes much in the players’ box, but she posted about her own stress measurements late Monday.
Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard Is Scary Again
After the form he showed on his way to a title at ATP 500 Basel last October, looking utterly unplayable on the fast indoor court, I asked several players about Mpetshi Perricard at the outset of this season, thinking the 21-year-old would be one of the most relevant factors in men’s tennis this year.
“He played me in Basel and he averaged 132 miles an hour on the second serve,” said Ben Shelton, who was the runner-up at that tournament. “He double faulted under five times. And I almost broke my thumb trying to return his serve when he hit me with a body serve in the tiebreaker. So, I'd say there's a lot of things that make it difficult to play him, but at the same time, it's not just the serve: he's evolved from the baseline. He can play. He can stay in rallies. He can can beat you with the forehand; if you put it in the zone, he can beat you with the backhand. And he's actually pretty fast, too, for a six-foot-seven guy. So, great athlete, nice kid, too; I like to be around him. And yeah, I think that he's got a huge upside.”
Frances Tiafoe, whom Mpetshi Perricard beat to end last year at Paris-Bercy and to start this year in Brisbane, was similarly impressed.
“When guys say ‘he takes the racquet out of your hand,’ he literally does,” Tiafoe said of Mpetshi Perricard. “I mean, he's going for broke most shots, he's serving [huge] on first and second. So you never really feel like you can take a swing and open up the shoulders, ever. You're kind of at his mercy.
“Obviously holding is relatively easy with him, because guys like John [Isner] and Reilly [Opelka] play much better from the back than he does. But once you get to 30-all [on your serve], he can take a swing down break point, he may break you. He's going to serve two first serves, even in the breaker. With the other guys, even though they hit big second [serves], it's not another 230 [km/h, which is 143 mph] right? So that's kind of where he sits, man. I hope we play again; I don't want him to do a hat trick on me.”
Given how high my expectations were for him at the end of last year—a season which he surged from outside the Top 200 to near the Top 30—I would argue that Mpetshi Perricard having a fairly irrelevant 2025 (until this match) has actually been one of the bigger storylines of this season in men’s tennis.
After opening his season with a run to the semifinals of ATP 250 Brisbane (a tournament which is classified as outdoor but is played under a canopy roof), Mpetshi Perricard won just 6 of his next 18 matches.
A sophomore slump isn’t shocking, but I was so very ready for him to be a big story this year. A seventh win—over Taylor Fritz in record smashing fashion— would certainly do a lot to turn his 2025 around.
Another Awe-Striking Stroke
Speaking of Tiafoe and superlative shots, Tiafoe was even more effusive about the backhand coming toward him during his first-round win on Monday, him despite a fairly routine 6-3, 6-4, 6-2 scoreline.
“He has the best backhand that I've ever played against, for sure,” Tiafoe said of his first round opponent Elmer Møller.
Tiafoe has played many guys in the GOAT conversation, but the pronouncement shouldn’t be entirely shocking to Bounces subscribers who have been here more than a month, since I wrote in depth about Møller and his off-the-charts backhand on the eve of the French Open, but Tiafoe’s effusiveness was still striking to me on Monday.
Tiafoe said he knew about Møller’s backhand coming into the match, but the effect of being on the receiving end was still discombobulating.
“It was weird,” Tiafoe said. “It was like—I don't know how to explain it. He hit like a deep return with his backhand, and he is rifling it. I'm, like, ‘Alright…you don't have that.’ Then he does it again. And again. I'm like, ‘Alright, I guess you do have that.’ For a guy who—I mean, he's not that tall, nor that strong when you look at him—he can absolutely just rocket the backhand. When you watch it on tape, you're, like, ‘OK,’ but when you see it live, you're like, ‘Man, that's a good shot.’ Yeah, I mean, he's a good player. He is young. That's a great weapon he has.”
Thanks for reading Bounces! Below the paywall, a look ahead to a few more matches to keep an eye on Tuesday at Wimbledon. If you’re enjoying my coverage, I hope you can sign on and support the effort! -Ben
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