A booming sport : do you know the Padel, between squash and tennis?
If you are told racket sports, you will rightly say tennis, badminton, squash or ping-pong. Today we are going to discover a relatively young sport halfway between tennis and squash : padel.
« The good idea to help his wife learn to play tennis »
Born in 1969, the sport was created by Enrique Corcuera, an important Mexican businessman who simply had the good idea to protect his tennis court from vegetation and at the same time help his wife learn to play tennis without having to pick up the balls off the court. With the help of friends of his, they found the sport had been booming in Europe for a few years.
Rule points : In the idea, the padel borrows its court and point system from tennis, its bounces against walls from squash and its full racket with small holes from beach games. To sum up, padel is played 2 against 2 on a court measuring 20 x 10 metres, separated in the middle by a net and framed by glass walls and wire mesh which serve as the boundary of the court. The balls are slightly less pressurized than in tennis. The only particularity to note is that the ball can be played after bouncing on the walls allowing longer spectacular exchanges.
« The number one racquet sport in Spain »
Mexico home country, then Spain as a host country. It was in the city of Marbella that the first padel court were created in Europe through Enrique’s European connections. The jet-set was immediately won over, and the sport was then taken in hand by the jet-set and introduced to the public. The result was a real meteoric rise in Spain, surpassing even tennis to become the number one racket sport in the country as well as in South American countries (mainly Argentina, Mexico and Uruguay). Playful, friendly and accessible are the key words to define this sport and thus to captivate 3 million followers every week in Spain in recent years.
The 2000’s structured the sport and the association of professional paddleball players offered a first international competition in 2005: the World Padel Tour composed of 9 women’s events and 16 men’s events divided into challenger, open, master and master final. The statistics today are impressive : 24 nationalities represented, nearly 3 million streams on the last competition in December 2019, the audience record was 10,000 spectators during the final Master.
« The integration of the Padel into the French Tennis Federation in 2014 »
The haemorrhage is slow in France but has been undergoing the same trend for 8 years now and makes it the second European country in terms of practice behind Spain with about 100,000 practitioners per week. Due to the proximity of our borders with Spain, the French passion for racket sports since always, the integration of the practice of padel of the French Tennis Federation as well as our rather common way of life, the development is considerable : infrastructures created, number of licensees, attraction of brands.
The questions for the future are the following: Will the padel continue to grow so favourably? Will Padel be the racket sport of the 3rd millennium? Is Padel just a fashion effect without precedent in sporting trends?
All these questions remain unanswered today but deserve to be asked and developed.
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