Indian Wells, California – For a tournament that invoices itself as a tennis paradise, Indian Wells tends to bring some elements from the Old Testament to the desert in California.
The sun that blows down on the day is replaced by temperatures that can become Frigid at night. In a part of the world that sees 365 rain around 14 days, a few always seem to land in the first fourteen days of March, which interrupt the game. Last year bees swarmed the capital. This year the sworn enemy of tennis players at all levels – which rarely stops playing, but defines its rhythm more than any other weather conditions – the small yellow ball dolls that they try to touch in the white lines and bring them to distraction.
“Bloody Windy there,” said Rinky Hijikata, the 24-year-old Australian who has credited his childhood in a windy suburb of Sydney for enduring his first round match with Alexander Shevchenko van Kazachstan, 6-1, 6-3. Over the complex, 40 MPH Wind Gest Buffet Palm trees, those serving ships and balls wiggle through the air like a weak football -free staircase.
Hijikata said that Thursday’s wind was not just like that: it seemed to come from every direction. Given that there was only one way to survive, and it did not mean that it was aimed at the lines to try to end points quickly.
“You have to give yourself big margins,” he said. “You have to hit the ball in the field and turn on your running shoes.”
Belinda Bencic, who followed her usual strategy when she conquered 6-1, 6-1 over Tatjana Maria, had a similar approach. “Trying to play with it, don’t try to take risky photos and just play a kind of a big target and work your legs hard.
“Respect the wind,” she warned.
Heat can be tiring and rain can slow the playing, but wind is the most fickle. Just like a powerful first -service or foundation, the power over tennis means little without knowing the direction. If it blows a court up and down, parallel to the sidelines, the effects are more predictable. On the one hand, players must be on their guard for overtaking with the wind on their backs. On the other hand, they must be aware of how much it will keep their shots. The player who receives a ball with wind behind it must respond faster; If it slows down a ball down, their footwork must take them with them and adapt to any sudden direction changes.
It usually doesn’t work so neatly. The breeze can be rinsed from Flushing Bay on some days in the US Open in New York; Arthur Ashe Stadium, the most important arena, was known for its vortex before the installation of a partial roof in 2015. During the ATP Tour event in Estoril, Portugal, just north of Lisbon, the wind from the Atlantic Ocean was able to make a mess of competitions.
The winds in Indian wells are of a different kind, something that somehow glides the spirit of most players while they are poetic about what their favorite stop on the tennis calendar is for many. The place is actually a wind machine thanks to the location between two sets of Bergen, the San Jacintos and the San Bernardinos, in the Coachella valley about 120 miles east of Los Angeles. The mountains behave like a funnel; The hot air from the desert grounds rises and the cool air comes in from above to take its place. In the outdoor dishes it goes in which direction it has chosen in whatever direction it has chosen. In the main arena, Stadium 1, the arrest and the doors and openings creates currents and vortexes to which players must immediately adapt.
You can literally see the wind that the ball simply takes over the air in the air pic.twitter.com/0umjtavd8k
– Owen (@kostekcanu) March 6, 2025
A desert wind can also cause other dangers. Bencic said that she left the practice court last Friday with a mouthful of the best of the desert.
“It was like a sandstorm,” she said.
De Wind provided a difficult first game for Joao Fonseca, the 18-year-old rising star from Brazil who is playing the tournament for the first time. Fonseca had to decline from breaking down in the third set against Jacob Fearnley Groot -Britain to win his debut in Indian Wells.
Fonseca dominated FearNley in the first set, while the Brit adapted to the wind and found out how he could play aggressively in it. FearNley might have expected an advantage. He played tennis at Texas Christian University, which in itself can be sufficiently flurries, especially at the TCU home courts, which were built into a kind of bowl.
“Much of it is mental,” said Fearnley. “You can’t really determine what the weather will do, so you just accept it and try to use it as well as possible.”
He seemed to get the hang of it, surpassing the Brazilian until a double error allowed Fonseca to draw even in the decisive set. Fonseca did not lose any other match in the windiest match he could remember, in which his kick served, jumps out of the advertisement court and kicked his opponent in the backhand of Fearnley. His hat blew away at some point; A towel rolled on the field and interrupted the game during another.
Players who fight both on the wind and each other 🤝
The towel had had enough of this point 😆#Tennis paradise pic.twitter.com/rp6elrk4oz
– Tennis TV (@Tennistv) March 6, 2025
“If it is windy, it is just a small mistake, and at this level it is only one point that you won the match,” he said.
Yet the Wind Fonseca made so uncomfortable that after the two -hour game he was on his way to the practice lanes to hit half an hour and try to get an idea of the ball.
After Fonseca and Fearnley finished in the capital, it was Emma Raducanu’s turn to try to find out the elements. Raducanu played her first game because a spectator was removed from one of her matches for showing fixed behavior towards her in Dubai last month. The person who appeared on her second round match against Karolina Muchová had “approached her, left her a note, took her photo and deal with behavior that caused her need,” said a declaration by the Dubai authorities.
Indian Wells brought safety and a lot of support for her. “I didn’t have what happened in Dubai in my head today,” she said.
Unfortunately for Raducanu, who thrives on rhythm and finding her groove, it also raised the kind of conditions that no player would like for a first game after a break. The wind, and the difficult challenges of Moyuka Uchijima, which controls the conditions by varying her shots, remained too much in a 6-3, 6-2 defeat.
Like many players, Emma Raducanu found the windy circumstances challenging at Indian Wells. (Clive Brunskill / Getty images)
“Extremely awkward in the wind here,” said Raducanu, who played her first game with her new trial coach, Vladimir Slopenik. Slosik previously coached Lulu Sun, who defeated Raducanu on Wimbledon last year and top-15 pillar Daria Kasatkina.
“Many balls that were very, very spinny during the day and in the wind for these courts,” said Raducanu. “So it just jumped up a lot, and then a bit short, like almost as an accident.
“I didn’t really know what would come.”
While the night dropped and the temperature dropped, the wind died. Of course, then came the rain, a cold steady drizzle that ensured that the game stopped around 8:30 PM at 9.25 pm, officials called the game for the night.
Prior to the tournament, the decision of the BNP Paribas had opened to change his judicial provider the discussion among the players about the circumstances. On the first proof, the new Laykold surface is still resilient, with the desert sand and the grain in his paint that spin balls from battle zones and roughly make it felt. It is the swings in sun and cloud, hot and cold, and above all, windy and calm that the conditions that Andrey Rublev has compared to playing four tournaments in one.
If the prediction is good – always a large one in the desert – the windfalls will be lighter in the coming days, making life on the tennis courts easier to handle. Unless the bees swarm again.
(Top photo: Frey / TPN via Getty images)