ABSTRACT
In an article to mark the eightieth anniversary of the fi rst Wimbledon championships, Dr Willy Meisl made the point that, although many of the sporting rituals fi rst invented in Victorian Britain were still visible, Queen Elizabeth II would see a fundamentally changed sporting tournament on her fi rst visit as reigning monarch in 1957. As an Austrian-Jewish sports journalist who had emigrated to London in 1934, his own career was testament to some of those diff erences in the media; the extent of government involvement in sporting international relations and a growing connectivity of world-wide developments. Although the piece treated Lottie Dod with all the hushed reverence usually reserved for a museum-piece, it refl ected a core sense of historical signifi cance amid sporting and social change. Wimbledon may have been the last of the tennis Grand Slams to off er equal prize money to the men and women winners in 2007, but corporate sponsorship deals with premium brands meant that, by then, profi ting from tournaments was only one of several revenue streams on which leading female players could depend. As the chapters of this book have shown neither Wimbledon, various football leagues, cricket’s County championship nor the Olympic movement had managed to sequester themselves from outside infl uence in spite of a considerable degree of insularity.
