Wimbledon Trophies Explained: Who Keeps Them and Why

The gentlemen's singles champion gets about half an hour with the trophy. He is handed it on court, holds it up, turns for each side of the stadium, poses with it in front of the photographers, carries it round the perimeter, and then it goes back into the hands of a club official and, before long, into a case in a museum two hundred metres away. What he takes home is a smaller copy made afterwards. The same is true of the ladies' champion and the silver dish she is given, and of every doubles pairing, junior and wheelchair champion at the meeting.

This is not stinginess. It is the difference between a prize and a perpetual trophy, and the All England Club has been on the perpetual side of that line since 1887 for one very specific reason: it had already lost two trophies outright to the same man.

The cup, and the two that were won outright before it

The trophy for the gentlemen's singles is a silver gilt cup with a lid and a domed foot, standing about eighteen and a half inches high and roughly seven and a half inches across at its widest. The inscription reads that it is the All England Lawn Tennis Club Single Handed Championship of the World, which is the sort of claim a Victorian club could make without anyone objecting because there was no other championship to compare it with.

It is the third trophy the event has used, and the previous two are the reason it exists in this form. The original prize was put up by the sporting weekly that had advertised the first meeting, and it carried the standard Victorian condition attached to challenge cups: win it three times in succession and it becomes yours. William Renshaw did exactly that, taking the title three years running in the early 1880s and removing the trophy from circulation permanently.

The club bought a replacement. Renshaw promptly won three in a row again and took that one home as well.

At which point the committee did the sensible thing. It commissioned a third cup in 1887 and resolved that this one would never become the property of a winner, whatever they did on court. Every gentlemen's singles champion since has been handed the same object, which means the cup in the presentation photographs from the 1890s is physically the cup in the photographs taken last summer.

It is worth understanding why the club had walked into the problem twice. The win-it-three-times condition was standard practice in Victorian sport, not an oversight. Challenge cups in rowing, athletics, shooting and archery were routinely offered on those terms, and the logic was that a trophy which could eventually be won outright gave a competitor something concrete to chase across several seasons. The flaw only shows up when one competitor is far better than everyone else for a decade, and lawn tennis in the 1880s had precisely that problem: William Renshaw and his twin brother Ernest were operating at a level the rest of the entry could not reach, so the condition designed to reward sustained excellence simply transferred the club's property to the same household twice in four years.

The wording on the cup is a period artefact in its own right. Describing the event as a world championship for the single-handed game was accurate enough in the 1880s — there were no rival championships worth the name, and the phrase distinguished the singles from the doubles rather than making any claim about grip. Read now, on a trophy still presented in front of a global broadcast audience, it sounds either quaint or extremely confident depending on your mood.

• 18.5Cup height (inches)
• 7.5Cup width (inches)
• 18.75Dish diameter (inches)
• 75Replica scale (per cent)

Dimensions as published by the All England Club. The replica figure is the proportion of the original, not a measurement.

The cup's surface has filled up over the intervening century and more. Names were originally cut into the body of the trophy itself; when there was no usable space left, a plinth was added beneath it to carry further inscriptions, and the capacity of that plinth has had to be extended again since. It is a slow-motion engineering problem with an unusual cause — the trophy is running out of room because nobody has ever been allowed to take it away.

What the pineapple on the lid is doing there

Sitting on top of the cup's lid is a small silver pineapple. Visitors ask about it more than about anything else on the trophy, and the honest answer is that no one has established why it is there.

Two explanations circulate. The first is social: for roughly two centuries pineapples were an extreme luxury in Britain, imported at enormous cost or raised in heated glasshouses by people with money to burn, and they became a standard decorative shorthand for hospitality and status. They appear on gateposts, on furniture, on architectural finials and on silverware right through the Georgian and Victorian periods, usually meaning nothing more specific than this is a generous house. A silversmith adding a finial to a presentation cup in the 1880s might have reached for a pineapple the way a modern designer reaches for a laurel wreath.

The second explanation is nautical: the story that sea captains returning from the Caribbean would spike a pineapple on the gatepost to signal they were home and receiving visitors. It is a good story and it may even be true, but it has no documented connection to this cup.

What can be said with confidence is that the club itself does not claim to know, and that the pineapple is decorative rather than symbolic of anything in tennis. Anyone who tells you it represents the fruit served at the Championships has the causation backwards; strawberries, not pineapples, are the food tradition at Church Road, and that has its own separate history.

The uncertainty is a small illustration of a wider point about sporting objects. Trophies acquire explanations retrospectively, because people want the details to mean something, and a confident-sounding story repeated for a century becomes indistinguishable from evidence. The pineapple has escaped that fate mainly because the club has consistently declined to pick one of the theories, which leaves the finial as one of the few genuinely open questions about an object that is otherwise documented down to the year.

The Venus Rosewater Dish and the figures worked into it

The ladies' singles champion receives a salver rather than a cup — the Venus Rosewater Dish, a partly gilded sterling silver plate a shade under nineteen inches in diameter, in use since 1886, two years after the ladies' singles was first held.

A rosewater dish is a real domestic object: a broad shallow salver used at table for rinsing the hands, of the kind that existed before cutlery made the practice unnecessary. This one is not a Tudor original. It is a nineteenth-century silver version of a sixteenth-century pewter design, and the club has always described it as a copy rather than a unique commission, which is a piece of honesty worth noting given how many sporting trophies are dressed up with invented provenance.

The decoration is entirely classical and has nothing whatever to do with sport. The central boss carries a seated female figure holding a lamp and a vessel, identified in the club's own description as Sophrosyne — the Greek personification of temperance and self-restraint. Around her the surface is divided into reserves showing Minerva presiding over figures representing the liberal arts, each with the attribute that identifies it: instruments for music, a globe or compasses for the mathematical arts, tablets and scrolls for the verbal ones.

Which produces the small oddity in the name. The dish is called the Venus Rosewater Dish, but the figure at the centre of it is generally identified as Sophrosyne, not Venus. The name has stuck regardless, and the club uses it. If you find yourself in front of the original in the museum, the thing to look at is the back rather than the front, because that is where the champions are.

Why a copy rather than a commission

The choice of a reproduction rather than a purpose-made trophy tells you something about the status of the ladies' event in the 1880s and about Victorian taste generally. Reproducing celebrated pieces of Renaissance metalwork was an established and respectable industry in nineteenth-century Britain; museums commissioned copies for study collections, manufacturers sold them to households that wanted the look of a princely collection, and the resulting objects were not regarded as fakes because nobody was pretending otherwise. A club buying a well-made silver version of a famous sixteenth-century salver in 1886 was buying something impressive and available, not something second best.

The subject matter turned out to be luckier than whoever chose it can have expected. A trophy for a sporting championship decorated with temperance at the centre and the disciplines of learning around the rim is, read one way, faintly comic. Read another way it is a better fit for a tennis championship than the usual repertoire of winged victories and laurel crowns, because restraint under pressure is closer to what actually decides matches than triumph is.

The engraved champions on the reverse now run to well over a century of names, and the plate has been in continuous annual use throughout. That is a considerable amount of handling for a piece of decorative silver: lifted overhead, passed between people, carried around a court and photographed under lights every summer, then cleaned and put back on display. The club treats it as a working object with a conservation regime rather than as a museum piece that happens to be shown once a year.

Why the champion hands it back before leaving the grounds

The rule is simple and it applies across the board: the trophies are the property of the All England Club and they do not leave the club's control. A champion holds the original for the presentation itself and for the photographs that follow, including the ones taken later in the evening away from the court, and then it is returned.

What happens to it	The original	The replica
Handed over on court	Yes	No
Photographed with the champion	Yes	Sometimes, later
Goes home with the winner	No	Yes
Engraved with the champion's name	Yes, permanently	Yes, individually
Owned by	The All England Club	The champion

This is not a Wimbledon peculiarity, whatever the folklore says. All four majors operate perpetual trophies and issue replicas, as do most of the older competitions in most sports; the Ashes urn does not travel with the winning captain either. What Wimbledon does that is slightly distinctive is keep the original permanently on public display rather than in a vault, so that the actual trophy a champion held is visible to anyone who buys a museum ticket in February.

There is a practical argument underneath the ceremonial one. A trophy that has been handed to every champion since the 1880s is an irreplaceable object with a documented and unbroken history, and the risk calculus for letting it travel is obvious. The club has occasionally allowed the trophies out for exhibitions, but as loans under its own conditions rather than as a champion's personal property.

How the other three majors handle it

The comparison is instructive because the four tournaments arrived at the same answer by different routes. Roland-Garros presents the Coupe des Mousquetaires to the men's champion and the Coupe Suzanne Lenglen to the women's, both named for French players and both perpetual. The Australian Open uses the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup and the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup, again named for players and again retained by the tournament. The US Open's singles trophies are silver cups without the same weight of nomenclature, handled on the same terms.

In every case the champion lifts an original and takes away a copy, and in every case the original is displayed or stored by the organiser. What separates Wimbledon from the other three is not the ownership rule but the age of the objects: the cup and the Dish predate the other majors' trophies by decades, and in the cup's case predate the Australian and French championships entirely. Handing back a trophy first presented in the 1880s is a different proposition from handing back one commissioned in the twentieth century, and it is the main reason the practice attracts more comment at Wimbledon than anywhere else.

A related question comes up whenever a champion wins repeatedly. Since the original never leaves, a player who wins the singles eight times ends up with eight replicas rather than one trophy with eight engravings, and several multiple champions have described the resulting shelf as an odd sort of trophy cabinet — the same object at the same scale, differing only in the year cut into it.

The replicas champions actually take home

Every singles champion receives a replica of the trophy they won, at three-quarter scale. The gentlemen's replica is a working copy of the cup, lid and pineapple included, standing a little under fourteen inches. The ladies' replica is a scaled version of the Rosewater Dish, around fourteen inches across.

The replicas are not handed over on the day. They are made and engraved afterwards with the champion's name and the year, which means the object a champion actually owns arrives well after the fortnight has ended and the crowds have gone. Several champions have remarked on the anticlimax of that, and on the strangeness of the gap between the trophy they lifted in front of fifteen thousand people and the smaller one that turned up later.

The practice of giving replicas rather than nothing at all dates from the middle of the twentieth century. Before that, a champion's tangible reward was the prize itself where one existed and, in the amateur decades, not much else — the prize money that now accompanies the title only entered the picture in 1968, a change covered in our guide to Wimbledon prize money.

Doubles champions receive replicas on the same principle, and so do the winners of the junior, wheelchair and invitation events. The uniform rule across the whole meeting is that the perpetual trophy stays and the copy goes.

1. 1Second SundayPresented on Centre Court and photographed with the champion.
2. 2Same eveningReturned to the club and used for the champion's formal portraits.
3. 3Within daysThe new name is engraved on the trophy or its plinth and on the clubhouse honours boards.
4. 4Rest of the yearDisplayed in the museum on the grounds, visible to anyone with a ticket.
5. 5OccasionallyLent out for an exhibition, under the club's own conditions rather than a champion's.
6. 6Following summerBrought back to the court for the next presentation.

The annual cycle the original singles trophies go through. The order is fixed; the dates vary with the Championships calendar.

The three-quarter proportion is not arbitrary either. It produces an object large enough to read as the real thing in a photograph and small enough to live on a domestic shelf, which is precisely the compromise a replica has to strike. Scale it up and it becomes an awkward possession; scale it down and it looks like a souvenir rather than a record of a championship.

Where the names go, and the engraver who works to a deadline

The two singles trophies handle their honour rolls in completely different ways, and the difference is worth knowing before you look at either.

On the cup, the champions are cut into the metal of the trophy itself and, once that was full, onto the plinth beneath it. They are legible if you walk round the case. On the Rosewater Dish, the champions are engraved on the reverse — the underside — which means the decorated face that appears in every photograph carries no names whatsoever. A visitor looking at the front of the Dish is looking at Sophrosyne and the liberal arts, not at a list of winners.

1. 1Match endsPlayers shake hands at the net and the court is cleared for the presentation party.
2. 2Trophies brought outThe original trophy and the runner-up's salver are carried onto court by club staff.
3. 3PresentationThe club's presenting officer hands over the salver first and the trophy second.
4. 4The liftThe champion raises the trophy to each side of the stadium for the photographers.
5. 5Perimeter walkThe champion carries it round the edge of the court and, by custom, towards their own box.
6. 6HandbackThe original returns to the club's care; the engraved replica follows later.

The sequence of a Wimbledon singles presentation. It describes the order of events, not the timings, which vary with the match.

Engraving is done on site during the Championships rather than sent away afterwards. The names also go onto the honours boards inside the members' clubhouse, which are updated in the hours after each final, so the completed record exists before the grounds have emptied. That is the origin of a detail people repeat without quite believing: a champion's name can be finished and in place while they are still doing television interviews in the same building.

The engraver's job is harder than the speed suggests. Space on a trophy that has been in use since the 1880s is finite and cannot be reclaimed, so the lettering has to be sized and positioned against a plan that runs decades ahead rather than filled in wherever there happens to be room. Cutting a name into silver is also irreversible; there is no draft, no undo, and no possibility of quietly replacing a spoiled surface on an object of that age. Doing it to a deadline, on the day, with a mistake permanently visible to every future visitor, is a genuinely uncomfortable brief.

There is a small human wrinkle in it as well. The engraver cannot start until the final is over, which means an unusually long five-setter or a rain interruption pushes the work later into the evening, and a straightforward straight-sets final gets the job finished before the crowds have cleared the concourses.

Silverware for the doubles and the mixed events

The five main championship events all have their own perpetual trophies, and the doubles ones have longer and stranger histories than the singles cups because two of them arrived with the events themselves.

Event	Trophy	In use since
Gentlemen's singles	Silver gilt cup with pineapple finial	1887
Ladies' singles	Venus Rosewater Dish	1886
Gentlemen's doubles	Challenge cup transferred from the Oxford tournament	1884
Ladies' doubles	Duchess of Kent Challenge Cup	1949
Mixed doubles	Presentation cup dating from the same period	1949

The gentlemen's doubles trophy is the oldest of the five in continuous championship use, because when the All England Club absorbed the Oxford University doubles event in 1884 it took the trophy along with the competition. The ladies' doubles has been played for the Duchess of Kent Challenge Cup since 1949, the year the club regularised silverware across the events that had grown up piecemeal in the decades before the war, and the mixed doubles trophy dates from the same period.

Beaten finalists are not sent away empty-handed. Runners-up in the singles receive silver salvers, presented on court immediately before the champion's trophy, which is the part of the ceremony most spectators talk through and most losing finalists remember least fondly. Doubles runners-up receive the equivalent.

The runner-up salvers are, unlike the champions' trophies, kept by the recipient. That produces the oddity that a beaten finalist walks away with the actual object handed to them on court while the winner walks away with a copy — a fact several players have pointed out with the specific dryness of someone who has done both jobs in the same decade.

The doubles trophies also carry a practical complication the singles cups avoid. Two names have to be engraved for every title rather than one, which fills the available surface at twice the rate, and the doubles honours boards have accordingly needed more expansion over the years than the singles ones. The mixed doubles compounds it further, since the pairing changes almost every year and the roll of names has very little repetition to compress it.

Junior, wheelchair and invitation silverware

The trophy cabinet is considerably larger than the five main events suggest. Wimbledon awards perpetual trophies for the boys' and girls' singles and doubles, for the wheelchair singles, doubles and quad events, and for the invitation doubles competitions played by former professionals on the show courts in the second week.

The juniors follow the adult pattern exactly: an original that stays at the club, a replica for the champion, and an engraved place on a board. A number of the names cut into the junior trophies belong to players who later won the senior title on the same grounds, which is one of the more genuinely affecting things in the museum's collection. Our guide to the junior championships covers how those draws are filled and what winning one actually predicts.

The wheelchair events came into the programme in stages — doubles first, then singles, then the quad division — and each carries its own trophy presented on court in the same way, with the same handback afterwards. The background to those competitions is set out in our guide to wheelchair tennis at Wimbledon.

The invitation doubles are the outlier. They are competitive events with real trophies played by people who have retired from the tour, and the silverware is presented with the same formality as everything else, which is part of why they draw the crowds they do. Our guide to the invitation doubles explains how the fields are chosen.

The presentation: who carries it, who hands it over

The mechanics of the ceremony are tightly choreographed and have barely changed in decades. A table is brought out, the trophies are carried from the clubhouse, the ball boys and girls form up along the sides of the court, and the presenting party comes down from the Royal Box.

The presentation has traditionally been made by the club's President. The Duke of Kent held that office from 1969 and handed over the singles trophies for more than half a century before standing down from the role, which means a single individual presented the trophy to the great majority of the champions of the Open era. He is the figure in an enormous proportion of the presentation photographs of the last fifty years, usually in the background, usually applauding.

Two smaller customs are worth watching for. The runner-up is presented first and is expected to speak first, which is a harder job than it looks and has produced some of the most memorable interviews of any final. And the champion is not steered towards the players' box by protocol — that has been a matter of individual choice since 1987, when Pat Cash climbed off the court and up through the spectators to reach his family and coach after winning the title. Enough champions have copied some version of it since that it now reads as tradition, but it began as one player improvising.

Where the trophies live for the other fifty weeks

Between Championships the originals are on display in the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum on the grounds at Church Road, which opened in 1977 to mark the tournament's centenary and is open through the year rather than only during the fortnight.

The museum is the answer to the question people ask when they learn champions hand the trophies back: where do they actually go? Not into storage. They sit in cases a few hundred metres from the court they were presented on, alongside the older trophies that were won outright, equipment from every era of the game, and the material record of the club's own history — a subject covered at length in our guide to the history of the Championships.

Seeing them in person adjusts your sense of scale. Television flattens the cup into something larger than it is; in a case it is a modest object, about the height of a wine bottle and a half, with a very fine gilded surface and a great deal of nineteenth-century detail that no broadcast camera has ever picked up. The Dish is the opposite — it looks unremarkable on screen and is genuinely beautiful up close, which is the reverse of what usually happens with sporting silverware.

Presentations that broke the routine

Not every trophy handover has gone to the script, and the departures are part of why the ceremony is watched as closely as it is.

The 1977 presentation carried an unusual weight, because the centenary Championships were also the year Virginia Wade won the ladies' singles with the Queen present in the Royal Box, and the trophy was handed over by the monarch in the club's hundredth year. Cash's 1987 climb changed the shape of every presentation that followed it. Boris Becker's 1985 title meant an engraver adding the name of a seventeen-year-old who had entered the tournament unseeded, which is the sort of afternoon that gets remembered in the engraving room as much as on court.

There is also the recurring small comedy of the handback. Champions who have spent a career working towards the object are, without exception, given it and then relieved of it within the hour, and a good number have said publicly that they did not know that was the arrangement until it happened to them. The replica arrives weeks later, in a box, by courier.

Weather has supplied its own variations. Before Centre Court was covered, a final that finished in poor light meant a presentation conducted in gloom, with photographers working at the edge of what their equipment could manage; finals delayed into the evening have produced presentations under artificial light in front of a crowd that had been in the ground for eight or nine hours. The ceremony itself does not shorten for any of this. The salvers are still presented first, the speeches still happen, and the trophy still goes back afterwards.

The most reliable disruption is not dramatic at all. It is the champion, holding an object they have wanted since childhood, being asked to turn slightly to the left for the fourth time by a photographer who needs the club's crest in the frame — a moment that appears in the pictures from almost every year and is invisible in all of them.

If you want the rest of the fortnight explained — the queue, the courts, the schedule and the traditions that surround the tennis — the section index is at the England sport hub, and the wider tennis section covers the game beyond SW19.