Australian Open: stats and records of the year's first Grand Slam
Discover the most successful champions, players with most final losses, unseeded champions, debut winners, and longest matches ever played of the Australian Open tennis grand slam.
Tennis
Who has won the most Australian Opens? What have been the longest matches at the Australian Open? How about the youngest winners of the title ever?
If you've ever wondered about the answers to those questions, fret not.
Ahead of the 2023 Australian Open main draw in Melbourne from 16–29 January, we take a look at some of the stats and records associated with the year's first tennis major.
(Stats are accurate prior to the 2023 Australian Open.)
Most title wins at the Australian Open
The Open Era in professional tennis didn't begin until the late 1960s. Including events before this, when only amateur players could compete, Aussie legend Margaret Court holds the record for most Australian Open titles with a whopping 23 crowns.
Those 23 are split across women's singles (11), women's doubles (8), and mixed doubles (4) – although only four of her 11 singles titles came in the Open Era.
Counting only Open Era wins, Martina Navratilova leads the way with 12 – three in women's singles, eight in women's doubles, and one in mixed doubles.
The most successful women's singles player in the Open Era is Serena Williams, who has won seven of her eight finals at the Australian Open. In doubles, Navratilova holds the women's doubles Open Era record, while the Bryan brothers Bob and Mike (6) lead the way in men's doubles.
Novak Djokovic is the men's singles record holder for most titles, having won nine (and lost none of his finals, with a 100 per cent win record in finals). His career Australian Open win-loss mark is 82–8, a 91 per cent winning rate – his best win/loss percentage across the four Grand Slams.
Most losses in singles finals at the Australian Open
Okay, so those are the winners – but what about the runners-up? Perhaps the unluckiest player in Melbourne has been Britain's Andy Murray, who holds a career 0–5 record in Aussie Open finals.
Australia's John Bromwich also lost five finals before the Open Era, but he did win two, meaning he at least tasted some success at his national championships.
Chris Evert reached six women's singles finals, winning two. But her four defeats in the championship game are the most in the Open Era, with Thelma Coyne Long also holding a 2–4 record in finals from before this period.
Australian Open champions: the debutants, the surprises, the youngest and the oldest
Let's take a look into the champions. We've heard about the most successful winners, but let's dive deeper and find out more.
There have been three unseeded singles champions at the Australian Open in the Open Era – Mark Edmonson claimed the men's title in 1976 before Chris O'Neil took the women's crown two years later.
More recently, Serena Williams – having missed most of the 2006 season through depression and falling to a low of world number 139 – entered the 2007 Australian Open ranked in the 80s and therefore was unseeded. However, she made it all the way to the final and dropped only three games in the championship match.
In the Open Era, four players have won the Australian Open in their first appearance at the tournament.
Virginia Wade was the first to do so in 1972, before Barbara Jordan repeated the feat seven years later. Monica Seles in 1991 is the most recent woman to have done so, while Andre Agassi is the only man to have won the title on tournament debut, achieving the feat in 1995.
And finally, let's take a look at the youngest and oldest singles champions. Martina Hingis holds the record for the youngest Grand Slam champion in the Open Era, having been 16 years 117 days old when she triumphed at the 1997 Australian Open.
Stefan Edberg holds the Open Era record at the Australian Open, aged 19 years 324 days when he won in 1985. However, Australia's Ken Rosewall was 18 years old when he won the national championships – the Open's predecessor tournament – in 1953.
Rosewall is also the oldest champion, having won the 1972 crown in the Open Era aged 37. Serena Williams' 2017 victory aged 35 makes her the oldest champion in women's singles.
What's the longest match played at the Australian Open?
There are two main ways of measuring match length – number of games or by match duration. However, the introduction of tiebreakers has made some of the older records impossible to be broken.
So, measuring by time played, what's the record? It's the 2012 men's singles final between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, which comes in at a whopping 5 hours 53 minutes.
Djokovic won that duel 5–7 6–4 6–2 6–7(5) 7–5 – a clash that also stands as the longest Grand Slam final by time.
The women's singles record stands at 4 hours 44 minutes in a first-round match between Francesca Schiavone and Svetlana Kuznetsova in 2011.
Before deciding sets were forced to be decided by tiebreaker, Schiavone and Kuznetsova played 30 games in the third set before Italy's Schiavone triumphed 6–4 1–6 16–14.
That match is also the longest women's Grand Slam match in the Open Era.