Wimbledon Rain Delays: What Happens When Play Is Stopped

A rolled green cover sits at the side of every outside court at the All England Club, and the people responsible for pulling it across have been standing near it since the first ball of the day. They are not watching the tennis. They are watching the sky, a radar feed and a radio, and their cue is a single word passed down from the referee's office. The gap between that word and a fully covered court is measured in seconds, because on grass the damage is done in the first minute of a downpour, not the tenth.

Everything that follows a stoppage — the drying, the rescheduling, the arguments about refunds, the crowd drifting towards the shops — flows from that first decision. Wimbledon is the only one of the four majors that has to treat its playing surface as a living crop under a deadline, and rain is the thing most likely to break the deadline. What the club has built in response is less a rule than a drill.

The drill when the first drops land

There is no rule that says play stops at a given rainfall rate. The chair umpire on each court has the authority to suspend play, and does so on judgement: whether the ball is still behaving, whether the players can move safely, whether the rain is passing or setting in. On grass the second of those is the one that matters. A wet grass court does not become unplayable because the ball skids differently. It becomes unplayable because a player pushing off hard to a wide forehand loses the surface under a shoe, and a knee or an ankle goes with it.

The moment the umpire calls it, three things happen more or less at once. The players stop and gather their kit. The court coverers, who have been standing by, take the cover across the playing surface. And the referee's office starts recalculating the day.

1. 1Umpire suspendsThe chair umpire on the affected court calls play suspended; the score freezes exactly where it stands.
2. 2Covers deployedThe court cover is drawn across the playing surface, the priority being to keep water out of the soil rather than off the grass.
3. 3Players leavePlayers collect their equipment and go to the locker room, and the clock on the suspension begins.
4. 4Referee assessesThe referee's office weighs the radar, the state of each court and how much daylight is left before the curfew.
5. 5Covers drainedStanding water on the cover is worked off before it can be rolled back, or the water goes straight into the court.
6. 6Surface checkedFooting rather than appearance decides readiness, because a court that looks dry can still be greasy.
7. 7Warm-up allowedIf the suspension ran long enough, the rule book permits a warm-up before the match restarts from the frozen score.

The standing sequence at an outdoor court. Elapsed time varies with the weather and the state of the surface.

The score is untouched by all of this. A match suspended at 4-3, 30-15 resumes at 4-3, 30-15, with the same server, the same ends and the same set of new balls due at the same point in the count. Nothing about the interruption alters the state of the match, which is why a rain delay can favour one player and enrage another without any rule having been bent.

Who actually stops play, and who restarts it

The two decisions are made by different people, and confusing them is the most common misunderstanding among spectators watching a court stand empty in bright sunshine.

Stopping play is the chair umpire's call, taken on the court, in the moment. It is a safety judgement and it is not appealable in any meaningful sense; a player can express an opinion and frequently does, but the umpire owns the decision.

Restarting is the Referee's. The Referee of the Championships and the referee's office run the schedule, and they decide when a court is fit for play, which matches go back on and in what order. That office is also the body that suspends play across the whole grounds when the weather is general rather than local, and that decides at what point in the evening the day is abandoned. So an umpire can stop a match on Court 12 while play continues on Court 14 fifty metres away, and only the referee's office can put both back on.

Why courts stand empty after the rain stops

The gap between the last raindrop and the first serve is where most spectator frustration is generated. Several things fill it.

The covers have to be dealt with before anything else. A full court cover collects a great deal of water, and if it is simply rolled back the water goes onto the surface it was protecting. Working that water off — squeegeeing it to the edge, letting it run — takes time, and takes longer the heavier the rain has been.

Then the surface is assessed, and the test is not whether it is dry. It is whether a player can plant a foot and change direction. Grass can look perfectly dry and still be greasy, particularly in the second week when the baselines have worn down towards bare soil and there is less plant material to give grip. The reverse is also true: a court that has been under a cover through a warm shower can be sweating underneath, humid and slick, when the sun outside is blazing. That is why covers are sometimes lifted and vented rather than removed, and why the referee's office will send someone to walk a court before committing to a restart time.

Restarting is also a whole-day decision rather than a court-by-court one. Putting a match back out for twenty minutes before the next band of rain arrives risks a second suspension, another set of covers and another delay for the grass — and achieves almost nothing. The office will often wait rather than take that trade.

The other reason play stops

Rain is not the only weather that ends a day, and on the outside courts it is not always the first. Bad light suspends play under the same authority and by the same route: the umpire judges that the players can no longer safely see a ball travelling at the speed a professional hits it, and calls time. Late June in London gives a long evening, but a heavy overcast can take the usable light out of an outside court well before the sun has gone, and a court in the shadow of a stand loses it earlier still.

The two causes interact awkwardly. A long afternoon rain delay eats the light as well as the schedule, so a court that becomes playable at eight in the evening may not be usable for a five-set match even though the grass is fine. That is why an announcement that courts are dry is not the same as an announcement that play will resume, and why the referee's office would rather abandon a day cleanly at six than start something at eight that has to be suspended again ninety minutes later. Floodlighting exists only on the two roofed courts, which is the whole point of them: under a closed roof the light is entirely within the club's control, and the only remaining limit is the clock.

How the covers work, court by court

The covering systems differ across the grounds, and they differ for reasons of space rather than status.

The outside courts use full covers drawn across by teams of coverers, a system with the virtue of being fast and utterly reliable. It has no motors to fail and no software, and it can be deployed by people who are already standing there. The disadvantage is that it needs bodies, so the number of courts that can be covered at the same moment is a staffing question as much as an engineering one.

Centre Court and No.1 Court have their roofs, which is a different proposition entirely, and both retain conventional covering arrangements as well. A roof is not a substitute for a cover: it stops rain reaching a court that is already dry, but it can do nothing for a court that has been rained on before it closed.

The overriding principle behind all of it is soil protection. Wimbledon's courts sit on a heavy, clay-rich loam that has been rolled and consolidated across months to give the low, fast bounce the Championships are known for, a process described in our guide to how Wimbledon grass courts are prepared. Water getting into that profile softens it, and a softened profile does not firm back up inside a fortnight. The cover exists to protect what is under the grass at least as much as the grass itself.

Drying a grass court, and why it is slower than a hard court

Compare the three surfaces and the difference is stark. A hard court sheds water off an impermeable acrylic slab; blow it off and it is playable within minutes. Clay absorbs, but clay is also worked and rolled between matches as a matter of routine, so returning it to playing condition is part of the normal cycle. Grass does neither. It is a living plant growing in soil, and the water goes into the soil.

The practical consequence is that a Wimbledon court which has taken meaningful rain will not restart quickly, whatever the sky is doing. Blowers can help lift surface water. Absorbent rollers can take some off. Neither of them can dry out a root zone, and neither of them can make a slippery leaf grippy.

There is a second-week complication. By the middle Saturday the baselines on the busiest courts have worn down towards bare soil, and bare soil behaves worse in the wet than grass does — it holds water at the surface, and it turns greasy under a shoe far more readily than an intact sward. The same amount of rain therefore produces a longer delay on day ten than it would have done on day two, on exactly the same court.

The honest summary is that half an hour after the rain stops is a good outcome, an hour is common, and there is no published standard the club is working to. It is a judgement about footing, taken by people who will be blamed whichever way it goes.

Why the number varies so much

Four variables move the answer, and they move it independently. How long the rain fell for determines how much water reached the soil rather than sitting on the cover. How warm and how windy it is afterwards determines how fast the surface gives that water back to the air, and a breeze does more for a wet court than sunshine does. Where the court sits in the grounds matters, because a court surrounded by high stands is sheltered from both, and a court in the open dries perceptibly faster than one in a corner. And the point in the fortnight matters, for the wear reason already described.

A club groundsman anywhere in England will recognise all of this, because it is the same calculation made on a village square in April. What is different at Wimbledon is the cost of getting it wrong in either direction: restart too early and a seeded player goes over on a damp baseline in front of a global audience, wait too long and the schedule that was already tight becomes unrecoverable.

The roofs on Centre Court and No.1 Court

The Centre Court roof opened in 2009 and No.1 Court's in 2019, and between them they changed what a wet day at Wimbledon looks like. Two of the eighteen championship courts can now play through anything.

	Centre Court	No.1 Court
Roof opened	2009	2019
Type	Retractable folding fabric concertina	Retractable, same operating principle
Effect on the schedule	Guarantees the marquee matches finish	Doubles the covered capacity of the grounds
Constraint	Subject to the 11pm curfew	Subject to the same curfew

Closing the roof is not instantaneous, and it is not only a matter of moving the structure. Once the panels meet, the enclosed bowl has to be brought to a stable playing condition, because a sealed stadium full of people is warm and damp and the air has to be conditioned before tennis is sensible on it. The figure generally quoted for the whole process, from decision to resumption, is around half an hour, and that is the number worth planning around rather than the few minutes the panels themselves take to travel.

Two policy points are worth knowing. The club's stated preference is for outdoor tennis, so the roof is not closed pre-emptively because rain is forecast; it closes when the weather actually requires it, or when the light goes. And once it is closed for a match, it stays closed for the remainder of that match, so a set played in sunshine and a set played under lights can belong to the same contest.

The roof also does nothing whatever for the other sixteen courts. On a genuinely wet day the Championships become a two-court event, which is a large part of why a backlog builds so fast: the matches that must be finished can be, and everything else stops. The engineering and the operating rules are covered in our guide to the Centre Court roof, and the way the resulting schedule is built is set out in the order of play guide.

Rebuilding the schedule after a lost day

A washed-out Tuesday does not simply move to Wednesday. It has to be absorbed into a fortnight with no spare capacity, and the referee's office does that with a set of priorities rather than a formula.

• 18Championship courts
• 2Courts with roofs
• 14Days of play

Structural features of the Championships, not figures from any single year.

Singles matters most, because the singles draws determine the finals and the finals cannot move far. Within singles, the deepest rounds are protected: a fourth-round match that has not been played blocks a quarter-final, which blocks a semi-final, so the office works backwards from the second week's fixed points and pushes the flexible material outwards.

The flexible material is doubles, and the doubles draws are what absorb the disruption. Men's and women's doubles can be compressed, moved to smaller courts, played back to back, and in extreme cases played under a shortened format if the Grand Slam Board and the club agree that it is necessary. The invitation events and the wheelchair draws, which sit late in the fortnight, are the most exposed of all, because they have the least room behind them. The way those draws are structured is set out in our guide to the Wimbledon doubles draws.

The old escape valve is gone. Until 2021 the Championships took the middle Sunday off entirely, which meant that in a wet year the club could open the gates on that Sunday and play a full extra day, as happened in 1991, 1997, 2004 and 2016. Those were the People's Sundays, unreserved and cheap and famously raucous. Since 2022 the Championships have run over fourteen consecutive days, which is better for the schedule in a normal year and removes the reserve day in a bad one. The history of that change is in our guide to Wimbledon's middle Sunday.

Moving matches between courts

Rescheduling is not only a question of when, but of where, and moving a match is more constrained than it looks.

A match already under way can be moved to a different court only in narrow circumstances, because a court change alters the conditions of a contest in progress — a different surround, a different wind, different sightlines, in some cases a different state of wear. The strong default is that a suspended match resumes where it was suspended. Where a move does happen, it is usually to keep a marquee match alive by putting it under a roof, and it is taken with the players' knowledge rather than sprung on them.

Matches that have not started are far more mobile. The referee's office reassigns them freely, and on a disrupted day the order of play published the previous evening becomes a rough guide rather than a promise. This is the source of the most common spectator grievance at Wimbledon: a ticket for No.1 Court entitles you to the matches that end up on No.1 Court, not to the matches that were listed on it the night before.

What that means for a ticket holder

Show court tickets are sold for a court and a day, not for a fixture. If your reason for going was a particular player and that player's match is moved to Court 15, your show court ticket does not follow them there — though it does grant access to the rest of the grounds, so you can go and stand in the crush around Court 15 with everyone else. Whether that is a fair bargain is a matter of opinion. That it is the bargain is not in dispute, and it is set out plainly in the conditions of sale.

The refund arrangements, and what they do not cover

Wimbledon has run a weather refund arrangement for many years, and it is genuinely more generous than most sporting events offer. It is also narrower than most people assume.

Play on your court	Long-standing treatment
Less than one hour	Full refund of the ticket price
One to two hours	Half the ticket price refunded
More than two hours	No refund

Four qualifications matter. The arrangement applies to tickets for a specific show court, and the measure is play on that court rather than play across the grounds. A Grounds Pass is not covered at all, on the reasoning that a Grounds Pass buys entry to the grounds rather than to a fixture; what it does and does not include is set out in our Grounds Pass guide. Debenture seats sit outside the scheme entirely, being a different legal instrument, and the debenture system has its own terms. And the roofs have changed the practical effect: a Centre Court ticket now very rarely qualifies, because Centre Court very rarely fails to produce two hours of play.

The club restates the terms in its conditions of sale each year, and they have been amended over time, particularly since the roofs went up. Treat the tiers above as the shape of the arrangement rather than a guaranteed quotation, and check the year's published terms before travelling on a forecast. Refunds are processed through the point of purchase rather than at a window on the day, and hospitality packages bought through third parties are governed by that seller's terms rather than the club's.

What there is to do while you wait

The grounds do not empty when the rain comes, which is a reasonable indication that the club has thought about this.

The Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum sits inside the grounds and is open to ticket holders during the Championships, and a rain delay is the only time of the fortnight when it is realistic to see it properly. The shops absorb an enormous number of people. The queues for strawberries shorten, briefly, before everyone else has the same idea.

The big screen keeps running. Whatever is happening under the roof is shown on the screen facing the Aorangi Terrace, and a wet afternoon on the hill with a Centre Court match on the screen is one of the more agreeable ways to spend a delay, provided you have brought something waterproof to sit on. Umbrellas are a more delicate question. A raised umbrella behind a court blocks the view of everyone behind it, and stewards will ask for them to come down in seated areas.

The most useful thing to know is when to give up. Play at Wimbledon is subject to an 11pm curfew imposed as a planning condition by the local authority, and the referee's office will not start a match it cannot finish; the reasoning behind that limit is explained in our guide to the Wimbledon curfew. By late afternoon on a thoroughly wet day the office is making decisions about tomorrow rather than today, and the announcements will tell you so if you listen to the wording carefully.

Weather in south west London during the fortnight

The Championships fall at the turn of June and July, which in the south east of England is not a dry season so much as a warm one. There is no month in the English calendar in which rain is unlikely.

Two kinds of weather cause trouble, and they behave differently. Frontal rain arrives as a band, is forecast reasonably well a day ahead, and tends to produce long, decisive stoppages — the sort of day where the referee's office knows by mid-morning that little will be played. Convective showers are the harder problem: they build through a warm afternoon, they are localised enough that one part of SW19 can be soaked while another stays dry, and they are close to impossible to place accurately more than an hour ahead. A shower day produces the stop-start pattern that wrecks a schedule, because each short burst costs a full drying cycle.

Warm weather has a less obvious effect as well. A humid, thundery afternoon makes the grass hold moisture for longer after a shower, and a court covered during a hot spell sweats under the tarpaulin. The most awkward conditions at Wimbledon are not the cold, wet ones. They are the warm, humid, showery ones where nothing looks bad and nothing is playable.

Championships that the rain rewrote

Weather has shaped the event since the beginning. The inaugural Championships in 1877 had their final delayed by rain, which for an event whose entire history amounts to a fortnight a year is a fairly emphatic start.

The most consequential modern example is 2001, when a badly disrupted first week pushed the men's final to the Monday. The club sold the Centre Court seats on the day rather than through the usual channels, and the final between Goran Ivanisevic and Patrick Rafter was played in front of a crowd quite unlike a normal Wimbledon final — noisier, younger, and now part of the event's folklore.

The four People's Sundays belong in the same category. Each of 1991, 1997, 2004 and 2016 followed a first week wet enough to force play onto what was then a rest day, and each produced the same effect: cheap unreserved tickets, a crowd that had queued rather than balloted, and an atmosphere the club spent years being slightly ambivalent about. The abolition of the rest day means there will not be another of those.

The roofs have quietly ended a whole class of story. A men's final delayed for two days, or a semi-final finished in near-darkness on a Saturday morning, are scenarios that belong to the event as it was before 2009. What has not changed is the effect of rain on the other sixteen courts, and on the players sitting in a locker room wondering whether they will play at all.

What players do through a delay

A suspension is not a break in the ordinary sense. The player is still in the match, still on the clock in a loose sense, and has no idea whether the wait is fifteen minutes or the rest of the day.

The standard response is to stay warm rather than to rest. Players keep moving, stretch, use a bike or a treadmill in the gym area, and re-warm as the resumption approaches, because going back onto a cool grass court with cold muscles is how injuries happen. Physiotherapists work through delays. Coaches revise plans. A player who was losing badly will use the interruption deliberately, and a player who had momentum will resent it just as deliberately — the accusation that an opponent has taken an unhurried approach to a bathroom break as the covers come on is one of the oldest complaints in the sport, which is why the rule book puts time limits on those absences.

When play does resume, the rule book allows a warm-up whose length depends on how long the players have been off, and the match then restarts from the frozen score. Everything else is as it was. That is the point of the whole apparatus — the covers, the referee's office, the roofs, the rescheduling — to make sure that when the tennis starts again, it is the same match.

The best preparation a spectator can make is to accept the shape of the thing. Bring a waterproof, do not bring a large umbrella, keep the ticket safe, and treat any published order of play on a wet morning as an opinion. A guide to which courts are worth heading for when the schedule collapses is in our page on Wimbledon's show courts and outside courts, and the rest of the summer is covered across the England sports guides hub.