In 2019 Dylan Alcott, Diede de Groot and Gustavo Fernandez arrived at Wimbledon unbeaten in the first two majors of the year and with the calendar Grand Slam very much the hot topic of conversation.

Two years on, Alcott and De Groot are in the same position as they prepare to return to the hallowed grass courts of south west London this week, with four days of wheelchair tennis competition set to start on Thursday.  

However, neither player admitted to having designs on the calendar Grand Slam in 2021 after they triumphed at Roland Garros last month, with next month’s Tokyo Paralympic naturally adding the phrase ‘Golden Slam’ to that agenda.

The first wheelchair player to hold all four Grand Slam singles titles at the same time after winning her maiden Roland Garros title in 2019, De Groot suggested after her second victory in Paris that she had put too much pressure on winning a third successive Wimbledon title two years ago. She was ultimately beaten in the final by fellow Dutchwoman Aniek van Koot.

While De Groot and Van Koot are the only two previous winners of the Wimbledon women’s singles at Wimbledon to line up in this year’s eight-player field, world No.2 Yui Kamiji is perhaps the most likely threat to a fifth successive Dutch victory, having won through to face De Groot in both the Australian Open and Roland Garros finals this year.

Kamiji also won a final set tiebreak last month in Birmingham when she played Van Koot in the final of the first women’s grass court wheelchair ranking event to be held outside of Wimbledon. With just two seeds, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that Kamiji and Van Koot could be drawn against each other again when the wheelchair draw is made at Wimbledon on Tuesday.

Other players to look out for in the draw include Colombia’s Angelica Bernal and Japan’s Momoko Ohtani, who make their Wimbledon debuts after both making their Grand Slam debuts in 2020, Ohtani most notably beating De Groot to reach the final in Paris last year.

Meanwhile, Jordanne Whiley and Lucy Shuker fly the flag for the home nation and South Africa’s Kgothatso Montjane returns after reaching the semi-finals in both 2018 and 2019.  

Alcott emulated De Groot’s achievement of winning the four major singles titles successively in 2018 in 2019 by also becoming the inaugural Wimbledon quad singles champion two years ago.

Fast forward to 2021, with the Covid-19 pandemic having resulted in the loss of Wimbledon from the 2020 calendar, the only blots on Alcott’s Grand Slam record in the last two years are two successive losses in US Open finals – firstly to Andy Lapthorne in 2019 and then to Sam Schroder in 2020.

Schroder is the only player to have beaten Alcott since making his spectacular Grand Slam debut and defeating the Australian in New York last year, the 21-year-old Dutchman doing so on clay at last month’s French Riviera Open to end Alcott’s 14-match winning streak.

With Schroder making his Wimbledon debut this year, the world No.3 and world No.4 David Wagner will meet one of either Alcott or Lapthorne in the quad singles semi-finals and news from Tuesday’s draw will be eagerly anticipated,

Lapthorne and Wagner were drawn together in the 2019 semi-finals, but whatever this year’s draw brings the Brit and the American will aim to make it back-to-back quad doubles Grand Slam titles on Friday, when the first of this year’s Wimbledon wheelchair titles is scheduled to be decided.    

While there was no Wimbledon in 2020, it didn’t stop Shingo Kunieda from making history.

Kunieda’s Australian Open and seventh US Open men’s singles titles last season saw him break the record for most Grand Slam titles won by a wheelchair player, as he claimed his 45th title at the majors in both singles and doubles in New York.

However, having won the inaugural Wimbledon men’s wheelchair doubles event sanctioned for world ranking points in 2006, Kunieda still has one major accolade missing from his extraordinary career CV. 

Since singles events were first introduced to the Wimbledon schedule in 2016, the closest that world No.1 Kunieda has come to lifting the men’s title was 2019, when he lost out in three sets in the final to Gustavo Fernandez.

This year world No. 3 Fernandez is one of two former champions among the men’s field. The other is Gordon Reid, the inaugural Wimbledon wheelchair singles champion in 2016.

Reid earned a timely boost ahead of this year’s event when defeating Fernandez convincingly last month in the final of the grass court championships at The Queen’s Club. The Briton also beat Joachim Gerard in The Queen’s Club semi-finals and Gerard arrives for his latest Wimbledon challenge with his first career Grand Slam title safely gathered after his victory at the Australian Open in February.

Gerard’s triumph in Melbourne was his second successive Grand Slam final against Alfie Hewett after Hewett claimed his second Roland Garros title last October before making it a hat-trick of titles in Paris last month and subsequently moving above Fernandez to become world No. 2.

All eight men’s players among this year’s entries are former doubles champions at Wimbledon, including French duo Stephane Houdet and Nicolas Peifer.

Meanwhile Dutchman Tom Egberink, one half of the men’s doubles champions in 2012, is set to make his Grand Slam singles debut this week after last appearing at Wimbledon in 2014.