The women's singles field has a number of potential champions among it and Coco Gauff may be ready to triumph in SW19 and deny Aryna Sabalenka of a first Grand Slam title of the year.
Top seed and world number one Aryna Sabalenka is a clear favourite for Wimbledon this year, but the London grass courts are nothing if not a great leveller and this feels like a pretty open field for the year’s third Grand Slam tournament.
The outright market expects Elena Rybakina, the 2022 champion, to pose most problems for 11/4 Sabalenka and the Kazakh is 11/2, then it’s 7/1 Coco Gauff and 8/1 Iga Swiatek according to the Wimbledon odds.
Wimbledon tips
Coco Gauff to win Wimbledon @ 7/1
In the wake of her superb French Open final victory over Sabalenka on clay, Gauff faces a tough opener on the Wimbledon grass against useful Ukrainian Dayana Yastremska.
But it’s still a match the American should win and Gauff may have learned enough from winning her second Grand Slam singles silverware in Paris to enable her to win more major titles in the near future.
Gauff is one of the finest young talents the sport has ever seen and it’s a slight surprise that it took so long for her to win her first major, at the US Open in 2023, and then to add to that New York City triumph in France recently.
But it’s just possible that the floodgates may open soon – they are likely to at some point – for Gauff and a stream of major singles titles could come her way. As always with betting, though, trying to ascertain when is the toughest part.
Gauff took last week off after losing in the first round in Berlin to Xinyu Wang, who went on to reach the semi-finals in Germany.
And so the Atlanta native and world number two should feel more rested for her crack at Wimbledon, where record-breaking temperatures are forecast for the coming fortnight.
Jasmine Paolini each-way @ 25/1
The 2024 Wimbledon women’s singles final was a long way from being a classic – the semi-finals had used up most of the energy reserves of finalists Jasmine Paolini and Barbora Krejcikova.
But, while Krejcikova took her chances when it mattered most against the Italian to lift last year’s Venus Rosewater trophy, if anything Paolini’s achievement in making back-to-back major finals at the French Open and then Wimbledon may be remembered longer.
The Tuscan, 29, has already shown that she is playing at least as well as she was 12 months ago by winning her home clay tournament in Rome recently, beating Gauff in the final.
And so, considering Wimbledon is in many ways the most open of the four Grand Slam tournaments – the players get to practise a lot less on grass than they do on hard or clay courts – a chance can be taken on the determined Paolini showing her run to last year’s grass-court title match was no fluke.
