If this is all true, the tour finals have the fastest courts which would make absolute sense. It shorten ups matches after a long and exhausting season and also adds variety to court homogenisation.

 

Finals has historically been the fastest. Let's see just how good you really are with the least amount of reaction time when playing against the very best.

 

Adjusted for the servers how? Does it also adjust for length of matches? Just counting aces would make the tournament where Isner - Mahut happened look a lot faster than if it had been a four set affair.

 

"I rate the playing speed of every ATP surface using ace rate as a proxy for surface characteristics. Ace rate doesn’t tell the whole story, of course, but as you’ll see, it’s a pretty good first- or second-order approximation. For each tournament, I look at the ace rates in every match, and control for the servers and returners in those matches. (The ace rate for every John Isner match will be high, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the surface is fast.) I say “playing speed” because ace rate depends on a wide range of variables (heat, humidity, balls, etc), so it reflects how the court “plays”–not anything inherent about the physical makeup of the surface itself.

The main advantages of this approach are that it is simple to understand (more aces = higher rating!), and that we can calculate it with limited information–data that is available for ATP matches back to the early 1990s. Court Pace Index and other Hawkeye-based metrics surely have a lot more to add, but they require much more sophisticated tools–tools that federations and tours aren’t about to share with lowly fans like us.

A tour-average surface rates 1.0. The usual range for tour events is between 0.50 (slow clay) and 1.50 (fast hard or grass)."

The Speed of Every Surface, 2019 Edition - Heavy Topspin
The Speed of Every Surface, 2016 Edition - Heavy Topspin

 

Rotterdam Open definitely didn't play faster than Wimbledon this year.

 

Raonic reaching the QFs might have inflated things.

 

Laver Cup should be ashamed of how slow it is. An indoor hard event playing slower than clay & grass is absolutely ridiculous & should be protested. No hard court should be slower than .90, tbh.

 

This table shows every tour-level event from the last 52 weeks.

What people really want to know: fastest & slowest by surface.

Fastest Hard

Slowest Hard

Fastest Clay

Slowest Clay

Grassest

Slowest Grass

 

What people really want to know: fastest & slowest by surface.

Fastest Hard
View attachment 419595

No wonder Pigeon is so useless at ATP Finals.

 

So Roland Garros and Paris Olympics at the same venue have a difference of 0.2.

This is a key factor why I question such lists. They go by results and factors from matches and then recalculate. But they should just measure it.

 

I remember reading somewhere that at the Olympics they used lighter and faster tennis balls, which could explain the increased speed at the event.

 

In my opinion, it doesn't make sense to measure it with actual matches.
That means Torino would be a faster surface in a year with more servers/attacking players in top 8 compared to a year with grinders. But in fact, the surface is the same. So it doesn't make any sense to measure it with actual shots of matches.

 

I can't believe Australian Open is faster than US Open. Newport is slower than average is totally wrong. The most appropriate way to estimate the surface speed index is to look at how much speed, height, and RPM the ball loses at the moment of rebound.

 

Why not? It was much hotter for longer at AO compared to USO which cooled down significantly after the first few days. 2024 has been a rather wet year for tennis, much more so than 2023.

 

I can't believe Australian Open is faster than US Open. Newport is slower than average is totally wrong. The most appropriate way to estimate the surface speed index is to look at how much speed, height, and RPM the ball loses at the moment of rebound.

It's not the most appropriate, it's the only reasonable one, counting aces is ridiculous.

 

This fits the eye test. I thought Canada Master's was weirdly slow compared to Cinci

 

Cinci has always stood out as having the fastest courts in the North American swing.

 

 

https://www.itftennis.com/media/11695/2024-technical-booklet.pdf

The pics above are from the ITF Guide of testing surface speed index. I can only barely make out a little bit, but I think it's not way too far to what I guessed before

 

Re; ATP Finals - I think while Turin definitely did seem fast, we have to understand that the sample size is also a lot less than an average slam or even an ATP event. Therefore, the weightage of say, one player having an insane serving day (like Djokovic in the SF and F of Turin last year) will be more than your average tournament, thus leading to more variance in the numbers.

I think, for the same reasons, the number for 250s might be slightly erroneous as well, though definitely less than ATP Finals. I will trust these numbers for slams and larger draws, when there's a higher sample size. Wimbledon is quick, AO and USO slightly quicker than average (though, not quite sure if quicker than an average HC or not).

For comparison purposes, here's the surface speed for the slams and ATP Finals using the same metric (taken from Tennis Abstract) for the years 2017-2019:

Tournament 2019 2018 2017
Tour Finals 1.31 1.12 0.75
Australian Open 1.27 1.16 1.14
US Open 0.97 0.98 0.96
Wimbledon 0.99 1.14 1.03
Roland Garros 0.71 0.72 0.76

 

This table shows every tour-level event from the last 52 weeks. Ratings greater than 1 are faster than average. For example, a rating of 1.25 indicates that the players hit 25% more aces than they would have on a tour-average surface.

 

Interesting, but the measurement method is far from being without question.
Why not use a method that includes more statistical parameters?

E.G.
Court Speed (Data 2022 + 2023)

Although it is data from another year, it gives a more nuanced and all around image of the speed.

 

Yes, i have found UTS website extremely accurate/useful when it comes to this, it had a formula that calculate the court speed that takes the field into account, serve stats etc.. The result is similar to your reddit link but probably more precise in the end. Interesting to see USO and AO are basically the same these days, as far as speed is concerned.