> Competitive tennis is becoming more about strength and height
Is that really the case? At present, the world's #1 and #2 men's players are 6'1" and 6'2" respectively. And both well under 200 pounds. These are not giant musclemen by anybody's reckoning. Nadal and Federer were also both 6'1" and quite slim.
It seems to me that tennis is about agility, coordination, and reaction time -- and that great height and remarkable muscle bulk are somewhat disfavored.
The two-handed backhand is apparently a shorter and biomechanically more efficient movement than its single-handed equivalent, is all. And at the top levels of sport, with so much on the line, every small advantage counts.
I think you're right that other aspects of the sport impose upper limits of efficient sizes, but I don't think the article (or the original poster) was using 'giant musclemen' as benchmark for strength and height.
Before I get too deep - I don't follow tennis. I'm just a sport nerd. I went and grabbed the 2007 and 2023 ATP men's ranking (cause that's whats on ESPN.com) and grabbed the heights of the top 10. Average height in 2007 was 71.8 inches (1.82m) and average height in 2023 was 74.5 inches (1.89m).
Djokovic (who is in top 3 in both lists... absolutely amazing) went from being tied for tallest in the top 10, to being tied for 4th tallest.
Height has risen over time, although the rise is far more pronounced for women than for men.
Perhaps most interesting though is the apparent decrease in height variance from the 1990s onwards. Before that, you had a mix of relatively tall and relatively short champions. But from 1990 onwards, which would seem to coincide with the decline of wooden rackets and the rise of the modern power game, you stopped seeing any champions below 180cm.
It's also worth considering that, even if height confers a significant advantage, its impact is limited by the normal distribution of height in the overall population. Assuming that A) you still need to have exceptional tennis playing ability to become a champion and B) exceptional tennis playing ability is very rare and not correlated with height, then you would expect rather more exceptional players of average height than exceptional players of significantly above average height.
So even if height provided an advantage with no meaningful upper limit, you still might not expect champions of 7'0" because there are just no players with such an unlikely combination of extreme height and extreme ability. You might instead expect a statistical sweet spot where the populations of players with both attributes is large enough that the overlap is where most champions sit.
Tennis, like fencing, is getting taller at the pro level. However, the athletes in both games are a lot more about agility than bulk. Above 2 meters in height, there aren't a lot of people (and many of the athletic ones end up playing for the NBA), so I would assume that there is room for "normal-sized" people in tennis for a while.
Is that really the case? At present, the world's #1 and #2 men's players are 6'1" and 6'2" respectively. And both well under 200 pounds. These are not giant musclemen by anybody's reckoning. Nadal and Federer were also both 6'1" and quite slim.
It seems to me that tennis is about agility, coordination, and reaction time -- and that great height and remarkable muscle bulk are somewhat disfavored.
The two-handed backhand is apparently a shorter and biomechanically more efficient movement than its single-handed equivalent, is all. And at the top levels of sport, with so much on the line, every small advantage counts.