For one week the tour that has spent three years remaking professional padel finally did the obvious thing and came to Britain. London Premier Padel P1 ran at Olympia and closed on Sunday night, the first event of its kind held in the United Kingdom, and by the organisers' count more than twenty thousand people came through the doors across the week to watch it.
The number that will outlast the confetti belongs to an eighteen-year-old. Martina Calvo, partnering Claudia Fernández, won the women's title and in doing so became the youngest champion in Premier Padel history. The pair had been playing together for a matter of weeks. Between them they were too young to have assembled much of a ranking, and in the final they beat Gemma Triay and Delfi Brea, the pair that has dominated the women's game, 7-5, 6-3.
There is a detail inside that result. The youngest-champion record Calvo broke has become the most restless mark in the women's game. Claudia Fernández, her own partner, set it in 2024; Andrea Ustero took it from Fernández at Bordeaux a year later; and on Sunday Calvo took it from Ustero. Three teenagers, three records, in two years. It is what happens when a sport's young talent arrives faster than the record book can keep up, and it is happening at the very top, on the largest stage the women's game has yet been given in this country.
"To win my first tournament is an achievement I've always wanted," Calvo said afterwards. "If I had played in many finals and not won, my head would be all over the place. We are very happy." It is the sort of thing a teenager says after a first title, and it deserves to be heard plainly, because the surrounding machinery works hard to make everything sound like destiny and it was not destiny. It was two very good young players on a very good day against the best.
The men's final went to the top of the game rather than around it. Arturo Coello and Agustín Tapia, who have owned the men's game, took the title, beating Federico Chingotto and Alejandro Galán 6-3, 5-7, 7-5, the outcome the seedings predicted and the crowd, on the night, seemed glad to have. "It's the first Premier Padel event in the UK, so you can really feel the excitement," Coello said. "It's a special place to play." He is right about the place. Olympia is a Victorian hall built for exhibitions, iron and glass and a great arched roof, and it turns out to suit a sport that likes to be watched through a wall.
Alex and I went early on the Thursday, in at around nine, collected our media passes, dropped our things in the press room, and then simply walked the place. There were no press conferences mid-week, so the quotes above are the tour's and not ours; what we brought back instead was the feel of the room. The best of it was a bank of warm-up courts you could stand right up against, close enough to see the professionals loosen up an arm's length away. That, more than any seat in the stands, is the thing padel can give you that older sports cannot: the glass puts you in the match, and even a cheap ticket got you to it. We also filmed a one-off of the podcast on site, Alex in front of the camera and me beside him (a face for radio), the two of us talking the event over and, rashly, recording our predictions on who would win. Whether we called them right, you will have to watch and see.
There was talk during the week about empty seats, and having been there I can say it plainly: yes, there were, on the days we went. The reason is structural. A day ticket buys you one seat for the whole day, and the day is long, play running from ten in the morning to nearly nine at night. Few people sit the full eleven hours, so the early crowd thins before the after-work crowd arrives, and the show court carries the gaps in between. Earlier in the week the crowd has somewhere else to be: the outer courts, two, three and four, are open, and much of it is out on the smaller matches rather than filling centre court. The finals are a different event: one court, everything funnelled through it in six or seven hours, and it fills. Split the early days into two sessions and you sense they would too.
What stayed with me was how much time the players gave. They came off court into a crush of people after autographs and photographs and stood there for all of them. And the watching itself has changed. My sense is that until recently few people here followed padel on a screen; this week, with the tour in London, everyone seemed to be. It had something of Wimbledon fortnight about it, when the whole country briefly remembers it owns a racket. The padel earned the attention. The women built their points patiently, rally on rally. The men brought more raw power. Either way, the court sense on show was at times hard to credit. If I had to name a favourite, and I do not really have one, I would pick Bea González. La Perla del Palo, they call her, after the corner of Málaga she comes from, the same coast this magazine takes its name from. I make no apology for my love of Málaga, great espetos in El Palo if you are ever there.
Around the four courts the promoters built the rest of it: a fan village, partner stands, a concert on finals night from the singer Zak Abel. This is the model the sport now travels with, elite competition wrapped in a festival, and the wrapping is deliberate, expensive, and aimed squarely at people who have never watched a padel match in their lives. On the evidence of the turnstile count, it worked.
The short of it is that Britain filled a nineteenth-century hall to watch padel.
My one regret is that we did not come on the Tuesday or the Wednesday, when the smaller courts are open, a seat goes if you want one, and more of the British and younger players are on show. That is where the home question really sits, and the answer to it is: not soon. Britain's best are Aimee Gibson and Catherine Rose, the national number one and two, lately back inside the world's top hundred, and on the men's side Christian Medina Murphy, ranked around one hundred and seventy. The brightest teenager is Ben Phillips, seventeen, the leading British junior, cast in the padel press as the country's best hope of putting a British man in the top hundred at all. Spain grew a P1 champion at eighteen this week; Britain is still working to put a single player in the top hundred. That distance is the whole of the British project, and for one week at Olympia it became a thing you wanted to follow closely.
How this was reported. Andy Galt attended London P1 at Olympia on Thursday 6 August; the finals on Sunday 9 August are reported from the official Premier Padel results and ASC research, with ranks and records verified against Padel FIP and The Padel Paper. Results, milestones and quotes are documented; the first-hand observations are the editor's own. Photographs: Red Bull / Premier Padel, editorial use.