With the arrival of summer in Europe, an ardent tennis fan such as myself anticipates the commencement of the only grass court Grand Slam – The Championships, Wimbledon. Held for the first time in 1887, it is the oldest tennis tournament in the world. The nostalgia for “tradition” that The Championships evoke has made Wimbledon the most prestigious of the four Slams for spectators. Even the tennis pros agree; from Rod Laver to Iga Świątek, players have often accorded it a hallowed status, a sort of crowning glory, in their careers. But what is it about Wimbledon that places it on the pinnacle of sporting success? Earlier this year, the BBC had given an explanation for it: “To outsiders, the event can seem forbiddingly formal…But beneath the military precision, is a surprisingly human system that’s underpinned by patience, fairness and a set of unwritten rules that have remained largely preserved since the Victorian era”.In this essay, I argue – against the claims of the BBC – that the reification of the tournament into The Championships is symptomatic of Britain’s attempts to obscure the colonial origins of many of Wimbledon’s rules, norms, and mores; instead, these archaic conventions are celebrated as an emblem of Britain’s (imperial) past. In an attempt to appear “progressive”, the tournament has eased or done away with some ludicrous expectations like players bowing and curtsying to royalty. However, many remain and are enforced with alacrity. Here, I deconstruct and examine some of them in an effort to decolonise the tennis world’s fascination for the anachronistic customs that have come to define the tournament since its inception in 1877.Kate, Princess of Wales wave as she walks with Prince George, Princess Charlotte, Prince William towards Centre Court for the men’s singles final at Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Sunday, July 12, 2026. Photo: AP.The ritualisation of the antiquatedIn 2006, the late David Foster Wallace wrote these words about the tournament while extolling Roger Federer’s game on grass: “Wimbledon is strange. Verily it is the game’s Mecca, the cathedral of tennis; but it would be easier to sustain the appropriate level of on-site veneration if the tournament weren’t so intent on reminding you over and over that it’s the cathedral of tennis. There’s a peculiar mix of stodgy self-satisfaction and relentless self-promotion and -branding.” How does the event remind us of its canonical value? By constantly reinforcing rules for players and spectators that are a legacy of 18th and 19th century British morality. The most talked about of these mores is the all-white dress code for the players which has existed for almost 150 years, that the tournament has only doubled down on, instead of relaxing. Take a look at its rules for clothing and equipment – all players must be dressed entirely in white, except for female players who can wear coloured undershorts beneath their white skirts or shorts to allay concerns over menstrual blood. However, this concession was made only in 2023 after protests from women. The tournament is so pernickety that off-white and cream are excluded from what goes as white clothing. As if their rigidity for the matches was not enough, the rules must also be followed for practice. Although the dress code has always existed and players were required to dress “predominantly” or “almost entirely in white”, they were made more stringent in 2014 to the annoyance of tennis legends like Federer and Martina Navratilova (who thought that the rules had “gone too far”). Both icons had been chastised by the tournament, Federer for his orange shoe soles and Navratilova for the pale blue stripe on a skirt she was wearing for an invitational doubles match. In the same year, several female players reported being forced to play without bras because they were visibly coloured; Venus Williams too was censured in 2017 for wearing a pink bra and compelled to change in the middle of the match. Andre Agassi was so annoyed by The Championships’ sartorial dictatorship that he skipped participating in them from 1988 to 1990.The fixation with white clothing can be traced back to conventions of propriety and the gendered and racialised politics of the British Empire, according to historian Beverly Lemire. She writes that the colour white became the medium through which segregation and the hierarchies of colonialism were performed. The whiteness of the garments was seen as a corollary of the whiteness of skin, thereby making white clothing “virtual skin” that became a marker of status, especially in the colonies. The cotton and linen required for pristine white garb came from the metropole’s procurement of cheap raw material for textiles from the peripheries. White apparel was also tricky to maintain, needing an elaborate laundering industry – that depended on labour from enslaved women and poor women of colour – to achieve the desired state (and shade) of whiteness. Tennis historian Robert Lake has also written that white was preferred for tennis clothing because it was believed to hide sweat and continue to look clean. The very notions of “cleanliness” and “hygiene” were closely intertwined with the imperial project where whiteness was equated with cleanliness. This is because the idea of racial superiority was constructed through a bundle of traits, and sweat (with its concomitant putrid odour) was considered by colonial environmental medicine to be more pronounced in black skin, with the colour black believed to absorb and emanate foul smells to a greater degree than white. However, it was also believed that the sweat and odour produced by black skin was not immutable; it could be remedied by ensuring sanitation and personal hygiene. In this way, whiteness was linked to cleanliness or sweetness (in terms of olfactory senses). By insisting on a strict white dress code, The Championships are erasing the history of the colonial devaluation of the sweating body. Beyond the plebeian athletes, even the notable guests invited to the tournament’s Royal Box have not been spared the oppressive sartorial conventions. “Friends and guests of Wimbledon” in the Royal Box should dress “smart” in suits and jackets, with ties, despite the stifling heat on some days of the tournament. For instance, a popular magazine remarked on how the young Prince George had to watch the men’s final dressed in a suit and tie, despite a heat wave in the United Kingdom. In a much-publicised incident, the F1 champion Lewis Hamilton was denied entry into the Royal Box in 2015 because he had the temerity to turn up to watch the men’s singles’ final without a jacket and tie. Commenting on the incident, the head of VIP security at the tournament had said, “Wimbledon is not a beach in Marbella, it’s a major tennis tournament”. The Athletic reported that the dress code for the women in the Royal Box was further tightened in 2026, after reviewing a revised code that was not made public. The document had illustrations of what the tournament considered to be appropriate attire for both men and women, with women being instructed not to don anything strapless, off-shoulder, or with spaghetti straps. One wonders if such policing of women’s garderobe with specific “sartorial strictures and prescriptions” serves a purpose other than to stubbornly hold on to an outmoded norms of expressing status, power, and rank distinction in a culture that still adores aristocracy, centuries after many of England’s European neighbours and imperial competitors/collaborators revolted to abolish nobility (for instance, Germany removed all public legal privileges or disadvantages of birth or of rank through the Weimar Constitution of 1919).Then there is the matter of who is invited to sit in the Royal Box. According to Wimbledon’s website, members of royal families (both British and non-British), “heads of government, people from the world of tennis, commercial partners, British armed forces, prominent media organisations, supporters of British tennis and other walks of life” attend by invitation only. With just 74 seats, the Royal Box is far more select than many restricted viewing enclosures at other tourneys.Though this practice is not unique to The Championships and the other 3 Grand Slams have similar exclusive seating arrangements, what truly sets Wimbledon apart is how regular folk get their hands on the prized tickets—by forming an orderly line that is now colloquially called The Queue. Each year, in Spring, most tickets are allocated online through a ballot system. But a clutch of passes is sold on the day of play. This ritual waiting line commences the evening before play, with several fans camping overnight, without any guarantee of actually being able to procure tickets. The tournament has formalised queueing through a code of conduct, despite protestations from locals over excessive crowding, littering, and “antisocial behaviour” from the campers. Notwithstanding in cult status in the world of tennis fandom, the Queue simply reinforces stereotypes for the British – a ceremonious buttressing of cultural concerns over hierarchical ordering of society and one’s station in it. Just as the dress codes, even norms for queueing have been entrenched since it began in 1927, becoming more streamlined in 2008. Marcelo Arevalo of Spain, centre, plays a return, watched by playing partner Mate Pavic of Croatia, to Harri Heliovaara of Finland and Henry Pattern of Britain during men’s doubles final at Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 11, 2026. Photo: AP.Inability to acknowledge historical injusticesWhile the Championships have been revelling in customs that should have been fossilised by now, the other Grand Slams have attempted to address historical inequalities in tennis, even if symbolically. In 2006, the USTA National Tennis Center (home to the US Open) was renamed in honour of Billie Jean King, the legendary American athlete who was also one of the earliest sportspersons to be openly gay. Another iconic woman, Althea Gibson, was honoured with a statue in 2019 at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. She was the first African-American Grand Slam winner in tennis history. The event’s main show court at the US Open, and the largest tennis-specific venue in the world, is named after Black tennis legend Arthur Ashe, whose bronze sculpture outside his eponymous stadium is inscribed with his favourite quote: “From what we get we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a life”. In contradistinction, the tunnel leading up to the Centre Court at Wimbledon has an inscription in capital letters from Rudyard Kipling’s poem If: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same”. Shorn of their history, these lines make perfect sense for tennis players who are urged to remain stoic and unaffected by victory and loss. But when contextualised, one would take issue with a poem originally attached as an epilogue to a story about George Washington’s resistance to public opinion. It is one thing to study the works of a racist and imperialist writer in a language or literature class; it is quite another to have it writ large in a venue of monumental proportions. George Orwell had once written of Kipling: “It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilised person”. And yet, Wimbledon seems to disregard this problematic heritage.Yet another physical reminder of how colonialism bolstered the class system within Britain sits atop the Wimbledon gentlemen’s singles trophy – the pineapple. There has never been any official confirmation of the idea behind placing a pineapple on the trophy but a theory has always been popular in academic circles, that of the zingy fruit being a signpost of wealth, luxury, and prestige. Pineapples are not originally native to Britain; they were one of the many exotic foods brought to imperial powers in Europe from the New World, starting a wave of popularity called the “pineapple mania or fever”. According to scholars, the fruit’s appearance was a likeness to a monarch with a crown. Because of its sumptuousness, many of British society’s elite placed pineapples as ornaments on special plates, to be exhibited on the dinner table but not consumed. Such was its fandom in 18th and 19th century Britain that it came to be nicknamed “King Pine”. In their new book, Victoria Avery and Melissa Calaresu have underscored the “unequal, exploitative, and extractive history” of the European discovery of the pineapple based on oppressive labour practices in pineapple plantations. The motif of the pineapple adorning the trophy, therefore, is entangled with colonisation’s brutal co-opting of cultivation in the peripheries to fuel the metropole’s idiosyncratic tastes. The Australian Open, unlike Wimbledon and like its North American counterpart, has officially recognised some forms of historical violence. One of the Australian Open’s marquee courts has been named after Margaret Court, Australia’s most successful tennis player who came back after each pregnancy to rake up more titles. Significantly, the tournament has made giant strides in acknowledging that Melbourne Park, the venue where the Australian Open takes place, has been traditionally owned by the Wurundjeri people of the East Kulin Nation. In stark contrast to British attitudes, the Park recognises itself as only the “manager” of the land. More crucially, it adds that it is “committed to advancing reconciliation by listening, learning and developing relationships with First Nations people and organisations”. Beginning in 2022, it celebrates the culture of aboriginal people through a dedicated First Nations Day before the start of the Open.Even the French Open, which has come under scathing criticism in the past for some sexist policies (like banning Serena Williams from playing in a catsuit in 2018), has shown willingness to move with the times. Amélie Mauresmo became the first female tournament director at the Open in 2021, becoming only the second woman to be appointed as a Grand Slam director, after Stacey Allaster was made director of the US Open in 2020. What makes Mauresmo’s elevation even more noteworthy is because of the ridicule she had to endure after coming out as a lesbian in 1999.The conflation of Wimbledon with British identity and politicsSo far, I have discussed the fusion of The Championships with a sense of a distinct British legacy. What is more concerning is the conflux of the tournament with international geopolitics and the stance of Britain within it. This is best illustrated by Wimbledon’s (now reversed) 2022 decision to not allow Russian and Belarusian players to play in the tournament, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier that year, imposing what can only be called collective punishment on athletes simply because of where they were born. This happened despite several players from Russia and Belarus denouncing war, if not explicitly condemning their national governments. The then World No. 1 (World No. 2 by the time the tournament announced its decision) men’s player, Daniil Medvedev had said that he was all for peace. His compatriot Andrey Rublev had scribbled “No war please” on the camera lens covering his match in Mexico. Daniil Medvedev of Russia on Jan. 10, 2026. Photo: AP.Although several international sports governing bodies like the UEFA and FIA imposed sanctions on Russian and Belarusian federations and cancelled events scheduled in the two countries, excluding individual athletes from an event that is premised on players representing themselves, except in team events like the Davis Cup for men and the Billie Jean King Cup for women. This uncharacteristically discriminatory resolution was made pursuant to UK government guidelines and diktats calling for players from both countries to prove their neutrality and provide assurances of not receiving financial support from Russian President Vladamir Putin and the Russian government. This was the first time since World War II (when German and Japanese players were prohibited) that Wimbledon had barred players from specific states from playing. By acquiescing to political pressure, despite admitting that the situation is beyond the control of the concerned players who may not endorse the policies of their respective governments, the tournament leant itself to weaponisation as an instrument of soft war against Russia waged by the UK. The same treatment has not been meted out to players from other geopolitically aggressive nations like the United States of America and Israel. The Championships, Wimbledon, are synonymous with Britishness in a way that no other contemporary sporting event is linked to a national culture. Many of the rules of the event that organisers, athletes, and fans see as peculiar foibles that are essentially innocuous are, in fact, insidious reminders of ideologies that erstwhile imperial powers used as devices to legitimise dehumanising practices. Instead of confronting its colonial past, British popular culture – with the tournament occupying a pride of place within it – desperately clutches on to remnants of its Victorian morality as a celebration of its glorious heydays, nostalgic for when it was a dominating force in global geopolitics.Journalist Paul Harris has astutely noted, “The English themselves might be the final nation to free themselves from the British empire”. One cannot predict if this may ever be realised, however as tennis fans (and players) in a postcolonial world, we must resist conforming to, and being complicit in, the deeply vexing convictions of order, civility, and etiquette that Wimbledon prides itself for.Ankita Gandhi is pursuing a PhD in law at Humboldt University, Berlin,