It began as a routine first-round match at Wimbledon and turned into the longest contest tennis has ever seen — three days, more than 11 hours of play, and a final set that simply refused to end.
On 22 June 2010, on the secluded Court 18 at the All England Club, American John Isner and Frenchman Nicolas Mahut walked out for an opening-round match few people expected to remember. By the time it was over, two days later, they had played their way into the record books and changed how the sport thinks about its longest matches. The scoreline — 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 70-68 in Isner's favour — looks like a misprint, but every one of those games was real.
A match that would not end
At Wimbledon in 2010 there were no tiebreaks in the deciding set. Whoever reached the end of a level fifth set kept playing until someone led by two games. That rule turned an ordinary match into an endurance test. Isner and Mahut split the first four sets two apiece, two of them settled by tiebreaks, then settled into a fifth set that lasted longer than most entire tournaments' worth of play. Game after game, both men held serve, and the scoreboard climbed into numbers it had never been built to show.
Three days, suspended twice for darkness
The match could not be finished in a single day. Play was suspended for bad light on the first evening, resumed and suspended again on the second as the fifth set crept past records that had stood for decades. Fans, journalists and even the scoreboard operators stayed glued to a court that had become the most famous patch of grass in the world. When it finally restarted on the third day, 24 June 2010, the fifth set alone had already lasted longer than any complete match ever recorded.
Isner served well over a hundred aces, Mahut close behind, and yet neither could break the other's serve in the fifth set for what felt like an eternity. Both players looked spent, leaning on their rackets between points, but they kept holding. The deciding break, when it finally came, ended the longest single set in tennis history and a match that had run to 183 games.
The fifth set alone lasted around eight hours — longer than any complete tennis match had ever lasted before this one. A small plaque was later placed beside Court 18 to commemorate what happened there.
Why the rules changed
The Isner-Mahut marathon forced tennis to ask a hard question: how long should a match be allowed to run? An open-ended final set could, in theory, never end, exhausting players and wrecking the schedule. In the years that followed, the Grand Slams experimented with different solutions, and eventually all four major tournaments adopted a standard final-set tiebreak. A match decided 70-68, the way this one was, can no longer happen under the current rules — which is part of what makes it timeless.
"Nothing like this will ever happen again. Ever."— John Isner, after the match
There was no real loser that day. Both men were celebrated for an extraordinary display of stamina and sportsmanship, and they posed together with the scoreboard afterwards. Mahut, who had fought just as hard and had battled through qualifying merely to reach the main draw, was gracious in defeat. The two would even meet again on the same court a year later — a far quicker affair — but it is the 2010 marathon that the sport will never forget.
A record that may stand forever
Because the final-set tiebreak now caps deciding sets across the majors, the raw numbers from Court 18 are unlikely ever to be matched. The match endures not only as a statistical curiosity but as a story about human limits — two players, neither willing to yield, pushing a tennis match further than anyone had imagined possible. Records fall and rules evolve, but the longest match in tennis history has a permanence that few sporting feats can claim.
