Queen's Club Championships

Infobox ATP Tennis Tournament
Name = The Artois Championships
Current =

Logo_size = 150px
City = London
Country = GBR
Venue = Queen's Club
Category = International Series
Surface = Grass / Outdoors
Draw = 56S / 32Q / 24D
Prize_Money = US$800,000
Web_site = [http://www.artoischampionships.com/1/home/default.asp artoischampionships.com]
Notes =

The Queen's Club Championships is an annual tournament for male tennis players, held on grass courts at the Queen's Club in West Kensington, London. The event is an International Series tournament on Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) Tour. Its sponsored name is currently the AEGON Championships.

The Queen's Club Championships are held every year in June in the week after the French Open. Grass courts are the least common playing surface for top-level events on the ATP Tour (excluding Challenger Series events). The 2007 schedule has involved only four grass court tournaments in the run-up to Wimbledon. Alongside Queen's, there are the Halle Open, and events in Nottingham and 's-Hertogenbosch. A further tournament is played on grass in Newport, Rhode Island, USA, in the week immediately after Wimbledon.

Outside Wimbledon, this is the grass-court tournament with the highest prize money and largest draw sizes and it has a reputation for helping to produce Wimbledon champions (see the "Players and Winners" section under "Statistics" further down the page). In addition to this it enjoys full coverage on BBC TV in the UK, and as such is more popular amongst British fans than the LTA run event in Nottingham. However despite the reputation of Queen's, Roger Federer, the dominant grass court player of recent years, has generally preferred to play at the Gerry Weber Open in Halle as his warm-up to Wimbledon. Andy Roddick and Lleyton Hewitt have dominated the tournament in this decade, both winning 4 titles each. Roddick has called the courts at the Queen's Club 'arguably the best in the world'. [ [http://www.artoischampionships.com/1/news/video.asp See the video for Sunday, June 10th, 2007 - Roddick speaks near the end.] ]

Past results

Men's singles finals

Since 1969:

Women's doubles finals

Junior championship finals

The Junior Championship
*2007 - Uladzimir Ignatik beat Gastão Elias
*2006 - Iain Atkinson beat Nicolas Santos
*2003 - Florin Mergea beat Chris Guccione
*2002 - Alex Bogdanovic beat Dudi SelaThe HSBC Junior Invitation Cup
*2001 - Santiago Gonzalez beat Andrew BanksThe David Lloyd Leisure Cup
*2000 - Lee Childs beat Arnaud Segoda
*1999 - Jarkko Nieminen beat Lee Childs
*1998 - Edgardo Massa beat Wei-Jen ChangThe Sam Whitbread Cup
*1997 - Nicolás Massú beat Xavier Malisse
*1996 - Jaymon Crabb beat Arvind Parmer
*1995 - Alejandro Hernandez beat Jamie Delgado
*1994 - Jamie Delgado beat Nicolás Lapentti
*1993 - Neville Godwin beat David Skoch
*1992 - Grant Doyle beat Lucas Arnold
*1991 - Leander Paes beat Nicolas Kischewitz
*1990 - Andrew Foster beat Dirk Dier

tatistics

Players and Winners

*Most Titles - John McEnroe (4 singles and 1 doubles).
*Most Singles Titles 4 - John McEnroe, Boris Becker, Lleyton Hewitt and Andy Roddick
*Youngest Winner - Boris Becker, 17 years 207 days in 1985.
*Oldest Winner - Jimmy Connors, 30 years 284 days in 1983.
*Lowest Ranked Champion - Scott Draper, ranked 108 in the world in 1998.
*Lowest Ranked Finalist - Laurence Tieleman, ranked 253 in the world in 1998.
*Winners of both Tournaments - Pete Sampras in 1995 (doubles with Todd Martin), and Mark Philippoussis in 1997 (doubles with Patrick Rafter).
*Most Prize Money Received - Pete Sampras won GBP241,804 from playing at Queen's Club. Lleyton Hewitt, who is still active on the tour, follows him closely with GBP204,084.
*22 of the last 25 Wimbledon champions have played at the Queen's Club Championships.

Matches

*Longest Final - Sampras beat Henman in 151 minutes in 1999.
*Shortest Final - Stich beat Ferreira in 57 minutes in 1993.
*Longest Match (time) - Ashe beat Mitten in 6 hours and 16 minutes in 1979.
*Longest Match (games) - Odizor beat Forget in a match containing 65 games in 1987.

Attendance

*Centre Court holds 6,478 spectators.
*The highest total attendance for the week was in 2003, when 52,553 people attended the event.
*The highest attendance for one day was 8,362 on June 11th, 2003.

Other facts

*During the 2004 singles tournament, Andy Roddick set the world record for the fastest serve recorded at 153 mph (246.2 km/h) during a straight-set victory over Thailand's Paradorn Srichaphan in the quarter-finals.
*The ballgirls for the Artois Championships are provided by Nonsuch High School and St Philomena's Catholic High School for Girls, two schools in the London Borough of Sutton.

ee also

*Tennis
*2007 Queen's Club Championships
*2008 Queen's Club Championships
*Wimbledon Championships

References

External links

* [http://www.artoistennis.com Official tournament website]
* [http://www.queensclub.co.uk The Queen's Club website]
* [http://www.atptennis.com/en/tournaments/profile/311.asp ATP tournament profile]
* [http://www.tenniscorner.net/index.php?corner=M&action=tournament&gid=GBR001 tenniscorner.net tournament page]
* [http://www.sportsrecords.co.uk/tennis/tennis11x.htm List of past champions at sportsrecords.co.uk]