Suzanne Lenglen Changes the Game at Wimbledon

Wimbledon returned in 1919 after four years without a championship during the First World War. On July 5, its women’s title was contested by a French newcomer to the tournament and an established British champion. Suzanne Lenglen was twenty. Dorothea Lambert Chambers was forty and had won the title seven times. What followed was not a ceremonial transfer between generations. Lenglen had to survive two match points before winning a long, closely fought deciding set.

The final score was 10–8, 4–6, 9–7. There were no tiebreaks to bring the extended sets to a quick conclusion. Under the challenge-round arrangement then in use, the defending champion waited while the other entrants competed for the right to face her. Lenglen had already come through that draw. Chambers’s most recent championship was from 1914, before the wartime interruption. The match brought an older tournament structure into contact with the athlete who would become its defining postwar celebrity.