Un article dans le NYT à propos de l'évolution des prises des raquettes et de la manière de frapper en coup droit dans le tennis de haut niveau. Il date de juin 2006.
Désolé, c'est en anglais

More and More Players Deliver Slap to Classic Forehand


Rafael Nadal has found success using a reverse forehand to generate spin, winning back-to-back French Open titles.

WIMBLEDON, England, June 26 — Tennis technique develops incrementally. Watch thousands upon thousands of forehands being hit by top players, and it will gradually become clear that most of those strokes are no longer finishing the way they once did.

The prevailing wisdom used to be that players started their forehand low and relatively loose, then finished high and relatively firm, generating pace and topspin. But somewhere on the long, sweat-stained path that led from Chris Evert and Jimmy Connors to Maria Sharapova and Roger Federer, that technique has developed an extra twist.

Tune in to Wimbledon and watch players making contact with the ball, then letting the racket head wrap loosely and very quickly around their opposite shoulder or arm. Sometimes, the racket head finishes pointing down at the well-groomed turf.

Watch a while longer and see some of these same players hitting a reverse forehand. The racket rises on a much more vertical plane and finishes above the player's head, with the top pointing backward.

"I think what's changed now is really not so much the pace the guys can put on the ball, but the spin the guys can put on the ball," said Patrick McEnroe, the captain of the United States' Davis Cup team. "And I think part of it is obviously the rackets and the new strings where guys can literally take huge cuts at the ball every time and keep the ball in play."

Factor in the torque generated by open-stance forehands, and it is no mystery why follow-throughs are wrapping around players' bodies like scarves. All that kinetic energy needs an outlet.

But all this is not entirely new, according to John Yandell, a Yale-educated tennis teacher and analyst based in San Francisco.

"I think it's much more prevalent now, but I've got a piece of video of Bill Tilden turning his hand over and finishing with his racket pointing at the side fence and slightly down, and this was filmed in the 1920's," Yandell said.

"I think that anything a gifted tennis player can do in the year 2006 has been done by gifted tennis players before," he added, before referring to films from World Championship Tennis, a precursor to the ATP Tour. "I could show you Rod Laver finishing a forehand in the WCT final against Ken Rosewall in the 1970's where his left hand is over near his right shorts pocket.
"There's a bit of a myth that modern tennis is something completely new and so-called classical tennis is sometimes set up as a straw man to be knocked down. However, the one thing that definitely has changed is the extremity of the grips and the amount of topspin."

Those grips are known as semiwestern, with the heel of the palm nearly perpendicular to the plane of the strings. The grips have helped generate another component of the postmodern forehand — the radical twist of the forearm at contact, sometimes referred to as the windshield-wiper finish.

Yandell examines tennis, in part, by watching high-speed film, which runs at 220 frames a second instead of 30.

"You can see it very clearly in the video," he said. "It's not a wrist snap; your hand and arm are rotating as a unit. What happens is that the more underneath you are on your grip, the more you will naturally tend to wiper or turn the hand and arm over. So that is far more pronounced in this era."

Some coaches, including the Frenchman Patrice Hagelauer, no longer describe it as hitting the ball. They describe it as slapping the ball.

"Rafael Nadal does it all the time," said Hagelauer, a former national technical director in Britain and France. "The extension of the wrist plus this internal rotation of the arm generates great racket speed, and it can do so without a very long swing."
What makes Federer unusual and devastating is that he makes use of the windshield-wiper effect on his forehand with a much more neutral grip. His is a more modified eastern, or classical, grip than semiwestern.

"If you look at people whose grips are similar to Roger, like Andre Agassi or even Pete Sampras, they tend to finish with the racket more on edge more of the time, and they tend to turn it over radically less," Yandell said.

The grip allows Federer to play closer to the baseline than most and take the ball early. But, Yandell said, Federer's hand and forearm rotation and his open stance allow him to generate spin averaging 2,500 revolutions a minute on his forehand versus 1,800 r.p.m. for Agassi and Sampras, who is now retired, when they were filmed.

"Roger's hitting it as hard, but with 30 to 40 percent more topspin," Yandell said. "That allows him to find places on the court that nobody since John McEnroe has found."

Consider what Nadal's competition is up against: Yandell's measurements show an average spin value on his forehand of 3,200 r.p.m., with a maximum reading of nearly 5,000 r.p.m.

Nadal often generates that spin with a reverse forehand, a shot that was popularized on the run by Sampras in the 1990's, but is now being used in more static positions on the court.

"Nadal takes it to another level," Patrick McEnroe said. "That's probably why his bicep is so huge, even though he says he doesn't do a lot of weights."

Robert Lansdorp, a longtime coach based in California, has taught the reverse forehand for more than a decade, after picking it up from Sampras. It is no coincidence that two of his most successful pupils, Lindsay Davenport and Sharapova, make frequent use of it.

In theory, the shot allows the player to make more out of a vulnerable situation, trading horizontal swing speed for vertical swing speed, generating more spin and angle, and perhaps more pace in the process, than a shot executed by swinging across the body from an extended position.

Sharapova sometimes uses the reverse forehand from a position of strength in midcourt. She also uses it when she feels rushed or has to deal with a low ball; it allows her to generate racket speed from awkward positions.

Brad Gilbert, a coach and a former top-10 player, said: "When I was 15, my coach told me I was crazy to hit an open-stance forehand; he told me to get off the court. What I promise is that when I'm 60, if the players are doing something that looks crazy and it's working, I'm not going to say they shouldn't. I'm going to say, I'm behind the times."

http://www.nytimes.com

On pourrait inclure ça dans le jeu
Des joueurs à l'ancienne et des joueurs contemporains

Ouais, avec des joueurs avec un beret et des nanas avec des robes longues. Pour ce qui est des techniques, je ne m'y connais pas assez

Raquette en bois et en boyau de chat avec tamis de 5 cm de diamètre
On verra si on inlcus ça quand on aura du succès seulement. Sinon, on court au flop total

Avant on utilisait une prise plutôt eastern/continetale ( c'est à dire ouverte). Aujourd'hui on a plus tendance à avoir de sprises très fermées comme Nadal et Djokovic pour maximiser la prise de lift.

Federer lui, utilise une prise entre l'eastern et la semie fermée. Comme ça, on pourrait croire que le lift produit est moins important que les deux du dessus, mais en fait non.
Le geste en coup droit de Federer lui permet de générer un lift monstre (lift offrant de la vitesse en opposition à Nadal et son lfit bondissant) et une puissance d'extraterrestre.

Le lift de Federer est en effet monstrueux bien que différent de celui d'un Nadal, c'est bien que tu le soulignes car peu ont conscience de cet aspect là