Last year, the Princess of Wales barely attended any matches at Wimbledon. It wouldn’t have been that big of a deal, except that she spent years pushing the Duke of Kent out of the Wimbledon patronage, all to officially become the royal patron herself. The patron gets to pass out the trophies/plates in the two singles finals (Kate doesn’t bother with the doubles finals), and other than finals weekend last year, Kate only managed to go to Wimbledon one other day. They had to bribe her with “you get to sit with Roger Federer” too. What I’m saying is that it’s not like people are used to seeing Kate at Wimbledon at this point. As soon as her tennis fandom started feeling like work, she immediately invented excuses for why she couldn’t show up. Well, now that Kate has been missing for six months, people are starting to wonder if she’ll also miss this year’s Wimbledon. The tournament starts on July 1st. Given that her excuse for not going to Trooping is “it would be weird to work before her summer holiday,” yeah, she’s not going to Wimbledon. The All-England Club is already making contingency plans.
The Chair of the All England Club has now responded to those questions, explaining why they would not speculate about [the Princess of Wales’s] attendance. “Our priority is clearly that our Patron has the time to recover and we’re certainly not going to add any additional pressure on her recovery by speculating on her attendance at this year’s Championships,” Deborah Jevans said at a media briefing on Thursday.
Addressing who would present the trophies to the champions on Saturday 13 and Sunday 14 July, the AELTC Chair clarified that an announcement would be made ahead of the finals as usual.
She added: “And when it comes to the presentation ceremony, as in previous years, we will announce those that are going to be a part of that ceremony on the morning of the finals, so nothing has changed in that regard.”
The Princess of Wales has been part of some memorable moments during trophy presentations in recent years, most notably consoling an emotional Ons Jabeur after she lost the women’s singles finals in both 2022 and 2023.
They should ask the Duke of Kent to come back for the trophy presentation this year. That poor man was done dirty by Kate’s efforts to push him out, and he still goes to matches regularly (because he loves tennis). It’s going to be even funnier when tons of celebrities come out for Wimbledon and Camilla Tominey can’t write more nonsense about how “Kate is the reason why Wimbledon is so star-studded!” Oh, and this will probably be Andy Murray’s final Wimbledon too – maybe they should get Andy to do the trophy presentations, f–k it.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.