David Brewer, the US Open tournament director, said the speed on Ashe is the same as the outside courts and that overall, the speed is exactly the same as in previous years. He said all the courts at this year\u2019s US Open were resurfaced within a 30-day window.<\/p>\n
The speed of the Arthur Ashe Stadium court at the US Open has been hotly debated over the past few days but among the players, there seems to be no consensus. Brad Gilbert, the former player and ESPN analyst, is convinced the surface is slower than in previous years, something that, in theory, should benefit the likes of Rafael Nadal.<\/p>\n
But players tend to be notoriously bad judges of court speed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d Nadal said on Monday. \u201cI feel the court is in good conditions to play good tennis. Of course if you ask me what I prefer, I prefer these conditions (hot) than indoor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Spain\u2019s Pablo Carreno-Busta, who played on Ashe for the first time on Sunday, said he thought the court surface was similar to the outside courts.<\/p>\n
American Coco Vandeweghe said court speed was rarely something she pays attention to and Czech Petra Kvitova even went the other way.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do feel that the courts are little bit faster maybe than the past years or last year,\u201d Kvitova said on Sunday after her win over Wimbledon champion Garbine Muguruza.<\/p>\n
David Brewer, the U.S. Open tournament director, said the speed on Ashe is the same as the outside courts and that overall, the speed is exactly the same as in previous years.<\/p>\n
\u201cAshe is not slower,\u201d Brewer told Reuters. \u201cWe do measurements with our own proprietary tools prior to the tournament and then again after the tournament.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do that each year and we\u2019ve done that for about a dozen years now. Our data tells us that the CPR \u2013 the Court Pace Rating \u2013 is just like any other court on the site right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brewer, who added that not one player or coach had mentioned anything to him about the surface speed, said the DecoTurf courts at Flushing Meadows, which are resurfaced every year, are generally medium-fast.<\/p>\n
Each court speeds up a little during the tournament as the top level of acrylic paint, which contains sand, is worn away by the volume of matches.<\/p>\n
Confusion about the speed of courts is not unique to the US Open.<\/p>\n
At the Australian Open this year, tournament officials insisted the courts were no faster than the previous year. However, as some courts were re-laid earlier than others, they played faster initially, before they eventually all evened out.<\/p>\n
Brewer said all the courts at this year\u2019s U.S. Open were resurfaced within a 30-day window, depending on construction schedules, and said Ashe was re-laid at roughly the same time as the majority of others.<\/p>\n
From the type of balls used to the weather \u2014 which was unseasonably cool in the first week and thus made the ball travel slower through the air than in hot temperatures \u2014 there are several factors that can affect conditions.<\/p>\n
\u201cPlayers have their own subjective values of any number of things,\u201d Brewer said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt could (be that) they changed their string tension for the day to they had a bad night\u2019s sleep or it is really humid today and it plays a little differently. All that stuff comes into it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even Gilbert, speaking on the eve of the tournament on an ESPN conference call, admitted that weather played a big role.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
David Brewer, the US Open tournament director, said the speed on Ashe is the same as the outside courts and that overall, the speed is exactly the same as in previous years. He said all the courts at this year\u2019s US Open were resurfaced within a 30-day window. The speed of the Arthur Ashe Stadium […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3902,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3901"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3903,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3901\/revisions\/3903"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}