In 2017, in his return to the circuit after six months of absence due to injury, Roger Federer made a small change in his racket. He extended the head of it and made it heavier, with the aim of alleviating the passage of time in his body more strongly in his blows.
With that new weapon, the Swiss won three more Grand Slams and managed to smoke his historical weakness with Rafael Nadal. A few hours after Roland Garros starts, we analyze how brands innovate in tennis through the rackets.
This adjustment is not the only one that the Swiss made in his career, being another of the most important when in 2014, after two years of drought in the Grand Slam, he created with Wilson the Pro Staff RF97, with a larger framework that allowed him to be more aggressive.
Or when in 2022, in his last months in the circuit, he decided to reduce the weight of his racket 20 grams and increase his head to have a sweet sweet point.
This assimilation of the detail is not something strange in a sport in which the tennis players are alone on the track and only accompanied by their equipment.
Therefore, there are scenes that touch surrealism and remind more of spy films than to a professional sport, such as when Stefanos Tsitsipas appeared this year in the Dubai tournament with a mysterious racket covered in black.
Marketing? No, the Greek, involved in a crisis of results for a long time, wanted to try a new tool to improve its game, but for contractual issues I could not play with another brand of rackets, so it had to dye the entire racket black, so as not to reveal the model created by Babolat.
Interestingly, he won the championship.
Now, in the field of these weapons, artificial intelligence comes into play. Wilson’s latest model, the “Roland Garros Shift 99 V1 Session of Soirée” is designed with AI with the aim of optimizing the effects and revolutions that the ball can reach in the hit.
In a few weeks, when the company contrast the data with the designers, it will give more information about the process that has been carried out to use AI in the construction of this tool.
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The world of the racket gives for much more, with anecdotes such as the Yonex brand contract, which charges its tennis players like Nick Kyrgios, for breaking rackets; Or the Immaculate Nadal’s registration, which throughout his career used 1,250 rackets, as Babolat embodied in his last racketter, and never broke any.
This record was questioned by the Argentine Gastón Gaudio, who said that in the Buenos Aires tournament in 2005 he entered the locker room and saw the Balearic breaking broken seven rackets. Nadal always denied it.
The other factor within a tennis track is the balls, an element that has also been in dispute in recent years for the change of brands and types of balls that are used in each tournament and that favors the proliferation of injuries, especially elbow, wrist and shoulder.
“All the balls used in any ATP or ITF tournament have to be approved. There are different brands that are suppliers of balls of the tournaments and all have passed the homologation, but then with which ball each tournament is played depends on the ATP and the brand in particular,” they explain from Wilson.
“If there is a change in the circuit, this is not” because of the brands. “As a solution, it is proposed that the tournaments played before each Grand Slam are played with the brand with which the Grand Slam will be played (for example playing Cincinnati, Montreal, etc. which are before us operate with Wilson since the US Open is played with Wilson).”
Two years ago, during the Roland Garros dispute, Alcaraz was asked about a change for the circuit.
“I’m going to say the balls,” said the Murcian. “I would like to play with the same ball.
For the 2025 edition, Wilson will contribute more than 65 thousand balls to Roland Garros, which will cover the five days of previous phase and the fifteen tournament.
With EFE information
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