WATCH: Wimbledon openers prove tough for seeded players

First-round Wimbledon upsets: They happen to the best of them. And they’ve happened to a lot of them over the first couple of days at the Grand Slam this year.

Title contenders like Sloane Stephens and Grigor Dimitrov; former champions, such as Petra Kvitova and Maria Sharapova; and consistent Top-10 members Caroline Garcia and David Goffin are only a handful of the seeded players who lost their openers.

Over the years, a number of all-time greats have fallen in the first round of the prestigious tournament. For example, Stan Wawrinka—Dimitrov’s conqueror who’s currently on the comeback trail—dropped his first-round match last year as the No. 5 seed.

Here’s a look at some of the other notable dispatches over the years.

1

2015—Simona Halep bows out

A year after reaching the Wimbledon semifinals for the first time, Halep—seeded third—lost her opening match to Jana Cepelova.

2

2013 — Rafael Nadal tumbles out

The two-time Wimbledon champ, fresh off his eighth French Open title, wasn’t able to make a smooth transition from clay to grass in 2013. He fell in the opening round of a major for the first time in his career, losing in straight sets to Steve Darcis.

3

2002 — The high ends quickly for Roger Federer

After upsetting seven-time champion Pete Sampras in 2001, Federer returned to the All England Club as the seventh seed and a contender for the title. Mario Ancic of Croatia stopped his run before it ever got started.

4

1996 — A fantastic foursome falls

On the men’s side of the tournament, upsets hit the draw hard from the start. Four of the top eight seeds—Grand Slam champs Andre Agassi, Michael Chang, Jim Courier and Yevgeny Kafelnikov—were all gone within the tournament’s first few days.

5

1999 and 2001 — The top spot’s unkind to Martina Hingis

There was no bouncing back for Hingis at Wimbledon in 1999 after losing an emotional French Open final to Steffi Graf: She lost her first match in England to fellow teen Jelena Dokic. Two years later, the top seed fell in the first round again, this time to Virginia Ruano Pascual.

6

1994 — No four-peat for Steffi Graf

The German superstar had won five of the past six Wimbledons—including the prior three in a row—before American Lori McNeil, whose game was tailor-made for grass, served up a stunner.

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