If you have been following the professional tennis tour for a while, you might have heard it. Or even if you have played some local tournaments, you might have even been handed a so-called walkover yourself. But despite what you might think, a walkover in tennis does not simply mean changing sides at the net. In this article I’ll explain what we actually define as a walkover and what the term implies in practice.
In tennis, a walkover is the status of a match that actually has not been played, due to injury or other personal circumstances of one of the players, which indicates that the opposing players advances automatically to the next round.
While a walkover can be considered an official status in the tennis rule books, it’s not actually considered a win or a loss, but rather a neutral statistic. In that sense, it is actually different from the rule of awarding a so-called ‘lucky loser’ a match higher up in the tournament draw. This is because a lucky loser has actually lost the match before, but is only allowed to play because no other player is available to complete the tournament draw.
Now that you have a general understanding of what it means to be handed a walkover, I’ll elaborate a bit. Believe it or not, but there are actually quite a bit of subtle differences between how walkovers are handled by governing bodies of tennis.
Let’s take a closer look to the definitions of walkovers by the ATP, WTA and ITF.
In section ten of their official rulebook, the ATP defines a walkover as a:
“Match that did not begin because:
a) losing player was ill or injured or
b) losing player was subjected to penalties of Code of Conduct before first serve of match was struck or otherwise not permitted by ATP or tournament Supervisor to play.”
The WTA’s definition is as follows. Appendix K of the WTA rulebook defines a walkover as a:
“Match did not begin because
a) losing player was ill or injured or
b) losing player was subjected to penalties of the Code of Conduct before first serve of match was struck or otherwise not permitted by the WTA or Tournament official to play.”
Tenniscompanion.org has done a great job with an extensive article on tennis walkover’s too, and it’s article points out that a walkover basically can occur by the rulebooks based on:
- Illness
- Injury
- Penalty
In any other case, a refusal or inability to play by a player, should be noted as a default. However, in reality, you’ll come across the term walkover more often. Here in the Netherlands for example, any inability to play during a tournament is most often registered a walkover, because the most popular tournament software only allows for this option.
