Tennis Grand Slams sell women short in three sets

Diana Nyad

Years ago, I was watching a women’s Grand Slam tennis match with a friend who isn’t a sports fan. My friend appreciated the skills of the players - the shots, the gets, the athleticism - but she liked the tennis couture more. The match was a two-setter, rather quick and seemingly effortless.

The next time we watched a match together, it happened to be the 2012 Australian Open final between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. As the slugfest of a five-setter ended, both of us drained and exhilarated, my friend commented: “I guess five sets would be too much, physically, for the women.” Flabbergasted, I turned to her and said, “You’re saying this to me?”

Alas, my friend is not alone in her assumptions about the endurance of female athletes. Consider: In Thursday’s women’s US Open semifinal, Amanda Anisimova beat Naomi Osaka in the third set, but could Osaka have come back in a fourth? After taking in the four-set dogfight between Djokovic and Taylor Fritz, I was thirsty to see Anisimova and Osaka scrap further. The unsubtle message of professional tennis is that women don’t have what it takes for that.

After Djokovic and Nadal’s epic 2012 down under final, the exhausted players couldn’t even remain standing all the way through the trophy ceremony. “We took the last drop of energy that we had from our bodies,” Djokovic said. Djokovic, by the way, had already battled for nearly five hours against Andy Murray in the semifinals, while Nadal had pushed past Roger Federer in a four-hour grind in his own semifinal win.

Take a look at what are widely regarded as the greatest tennis matches of all time, and you’ll find mostly men’s Grand Slam five-setters. The 2008 Wimbledon final between Nadal and Federer was 4 hours 48 minutes. The 2018 Wimbledon semifinal between John Isner and Kevin Anderson went 6 hours 36 minutes. Add to that this summer’s 5 hour 29 minute French Open marathon between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz.

Match lengths are not set in stone. Since 1877, the men at Wimbledon have played three of five, but there was a short experimental period in the early 1970s, when the non-Wimbledon Slams (the Australian Open, the French Open and the U.S. Open) shortened early rounds to two of three. On the women’s side, matches were best three of five until 1901, when two of three became the standard. But women have sometime played five sets, too. From 1984 to 1998, the Women’s Tennis Association made its year-end final three of five. In 1990, Monica Seles defeated Gabriela Sabatini at Madison Square Garden for a Virginia Slims Championships final that was a masterpiece four-hour five-setter.

Today, in the four Grand Slams, only the men play three out of five. At the end of a hard-fought five-setter, it is not unusual for the depleted players to stand in each other’s arms at the net, like two gladiators showing the respect earned in hard battle. When the women finish the most-competitive matches, of course there is mutual admiration between them. But I yearn to see them fight to that last, gutsy fifth-set retrieval of a deft drop shot. They surely have more to give.

The obvious implication of shorter matches is that women are somehow too fragile for five sets, but that might actually be backward. Women have pulled off some of the toughest endurance feats on the planet. Timothy Noakes, one of the world’s top sports scientists (and the science adviser for my swim from Cuba to Key West), has posited that women may suffer fatigue in endurance events later than men. In 2019, Maggie Guterl ran 250 miles and 60 hours to win the grueling race called Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra outright, beating the toughest male runners. That same year, cyclist Fiona Kolbinger likewise finished first in Europe’s Transcontinental Race, which was 2,500 miles that year.

Other sports have left endurance bias behind. In the first Olympic Games in which women were allowed to run the 800 meters, in Amsterdam in 1928, several competitors collapsed at the finish line. For the next 30 some years, Olympian women were forbidden to run the 800. In swimming, it wasn’t until 2020 in Tokyo that women were permitted to compete in the 1,500 meters. Can you imagine Katie Ledecky being told she is too frail to swim 1,500 meters?

Martina Navratilova and others have argued that all matches, for both genders, should be two out of three. Does a longer match necessarily mean a better match? Not always. Early round mismatches over three sets can be especially hard to watch. Five-hour contests ask a lot of busy viewers. Some players worry about increased injury risk. But the heroic quality of the best matches would be lost without the test of those final two sets. A better solution would be for men and women to both play best two of three in the early rounds, then play three of five in the quarters, semis and finals.

In match after match, the best female tennis players in the world prove their dazzling skills and competitive mettle. But they are blocked from proving their physical and mental stamina in the kind of five-set gems the men’s side delivers. There is the gravitas of epic in that “last drop of energy,” and the women deserve to prove themselves gladiators just like the men.

• Diana Nyad is the first person to swim without the aid of a shark cage from Cuba to Florida and the author of the memoir “Find a Way.”