The Championships at Wimbledon are a massive operation! Putting on the event requires loads of staff, food, guests, and, of course, tennis balls…
Have you ever wondered how many tennis balls are needed, though? Or just how many punnets of strawberries the 2,000 strong dinner-ladies sell?
The answer may surprise you! A whopping 28,000 kg of strawberries and 10,000 litres of cream are supplied for each Wimbledon Championship every summer.
To put it in perspective, that’s the same weight at 3 elephants! All of those strawberries make roughly 140,000 servings.
If strawberries aren’t your thing, you might prefer scones, frozen yogurt, ice cream, or bananas?
Around 25,000 scones are served every year at Wimbledon along with 86,000 ice creams, 10,000 portions of frozen yoghurt, and 5,000kg of bananas!
30,000 pizzas are also sold. That’s a lot of food!
The fastest Wimbledon serve of all time was delivered by Taylor Dent in 2010 – it clocked an amazing 148mph!
54,250 tennis balls are used during the Championships period. Yellow tennis balls were used for the first time in 1986.
All of the tennis balls are refrigerated or warmed to keep them at a constant 20ºC until they’re used.
That’s because new tennis balls have pressurised air inside them, giving the ball its bounce.
Temperature can affect the pressure and it’s important, when playing at such a high level, that everything behaves as predictably as possible. Keeping the balls cold helps maintain the pressure and keeps the amount of bounce!
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