Players now regularly eat bananas between games to provide stamina, and pasta, salads, fresh fruit and fruit juices feature strongly in their daily diet.But will we see the Lomu-isation of tennis – giant, super-fit players in the mould of All Black rugby star Jonah Lomu? Not according to researchers at the British Olympic Medical Centre in London. The graphite rackets have given a competitive edge to the women’s game, improved their all-court play, and their top ten is now very tight.”Nutrition has raised fitness to levels where standards can be maintained for longer. Today’s women’s record is held by Brenda Schultz- McCarthy with 121.8mph.However, a big serve is still not enough on its own, said Alastair McIver, editor of Tennis World magazine “You still need an all-round game to win Wimbledon. Ivanisevic has as big a serve as anyone and he has got to two Wimbledon finals but not quite had the game to go all the way.”But the new technology has improved the women’s game, according to Mr McIver: “For many years we only had two women players who could win a tournament – Evert and Navratilova or Navratilova and Graf.

The fastest officially recorded serve is 142.3mph by the Australian Mark Philippoussis. At that speed the returner has one-third of a second to react. In a trial last week, Philippoussis produced similar speeds with graphite and wooden rackets.Fred Perry, three-times winner of Wimbledon in the 1930s, and Rod Laver, the grand slam winner in 1969, clearly served at significantly slower speeds, though precise figures are not available. These large-headed rackets offer up to 30 per cent more speed than the old wooden rackets.”Players are getting taller and many more are able to serve at 120mph,” said the International Tennis Federation’s technical director, Andrew Coe.IBM began monitoring service speeds in 1992. In 1979 Roscoe Tanner was electronically clocked at 141mph using a metal racket and was once unofficially recorded at 153mph.Today’s hi-tech graphite rackets have tags such as XL and FX, making them the XR2s and GTis of the tennis world.

“The game has lost a lot of its subtlety.”In the 1970s and early 1980s the occasional player served at high speed without modern racket technology. Wimbledon fortnight starts tomorrow. But cast your mind forward to the year 2037: it is the Men’s Final, with the number one seed, Robocop, pitted against the second seed, The Terminator. After a fifth set that is still unfinished after 95 minutes, it is decided that the match should be won by whoever serves faster. A little far-fetched, perhaps, but with every summer at Wimbledon, the age of the automaton tennis player who thrives on high-speed serves and eschews rallies comes a little nearer.
Tennis’s problem is not only that serves are getting faster, but that improved racket technology and a greater emphasis on nutrition and maximising fitness mean that more players are serving at high speed, more consistently.”It all comes down to the rackets,” said the BBC commentator and former player John Barrett. The world is your oyster.”The National Management Salary Survey costs pounds 420, from Remuneration Economics, Survey House, 51 Portland Road, Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey KT1 2SH.. Her male counterpart is 44, earns pounds 35,761 and has been with the organisation 17 years.But the earnings gap between the sexes has narrowed this year.

While male managers’ pay increased by 6 per cent, up from 4.7 per cent last year, women managers have seen their pay rise by 7.4 per cent from 4.7 per cent. Women directors have seen their pay rise by 9.2 per cent compared with 7.8 per cent for men.For any aspiring female directors Jill Ruddock feels the future is rosy: “You’ve got to think you are a person first and a woman second and then go for it. A lot of women who have been extremely successful choose not to fight it out in large organisations but grow their own companies and they don’t reach plc status as quickly.”According to the survey, today’s average female director is 40 years old, earns pounds 71,126 and has been with the organisation eight years. Her male colleague is 48, earns pounds 91,957 and has been with the firm 14 years.The average female manager is 37, earns pounds 31,550 and has been with the firm 11 years. I think increasingly women believe they can do it and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t.”She also thinks that the way success is measured may be obscuring women’s achievements: “We’re looking here very much at the large plcs where you have to have a certain type of personality, character and tenacity to claw your way to the top.