John Isner and Nicolas Mahut played Wimbledon’s longest match, lasting 11 hours across three days/ Image: Olympics.com

A tennis match that lasted 11 hours and five minutes, stretched across three days, produced 183 games, and eventually broke the electronic scoreboard sounds more like a story written for television than something that actually happened at Wimbledon. Yet that was precisely what unfolded when American John Isner and France's Nicolas Mahut met in the first round of the 2010 Championships. Their fifth set alone lasted eight hours and 11 minutes, longer than some entire professional matches, while both players repeatedly served to stay alive in a contest that seemed to have no natural ending. By the time Isner finally won 70-68, the match had become a record that remains untouched and a sporting absurdity that later inspired an HBO mockumentary.

The match that refused to end

Isner and Mahut began their first-round match on Court 18 at the All England Club on June 22, 2010, and neither could have known that they were about to spend three days playing one of the most extraordinary matches in tennis history.The opening four sets were already a serious contest, with Isner taking the first 6-4 before Mahut levelled with a 6-3 set. Mahut then edged the third 7-6, only for Isner to take the fourth by the same scoreline and force a deciding set.That was where the match became something entirely different.With the final set requiring a player to win by two clear games, neither man could create the decisive break. They held serve again and again as the score climbed through the 20s, 30s and 40s, with the match already far beyond anything Wimbledon had seen before.Play had originally been suspended because of fading natural light after the first four sets on June 22. The players returned the following day, but the fifth set still could not be completed, with darkness once again forcing the match to be stopped.They came back for a third day on June 24, still locked together.By then, even the electronic scoreboard had effectively conceded defeat. It stopped functioning at 47-47 in the fifth set because it had not been programmed to record a score that high.

70-68: the fifth set that became its own match

The numbers from the deciding set are difficult to comprehend even when written down.The fifth set lasted eight hours and 11 minutes and contained 138 games, with the players producing an astonishing 215 aces across the entire match: Isner hit 112 and Mahut 103.They also held serve for 168 consecutive games during the match, while Mahut had to serve to stay alive 63 times.There were only three service breaks in the entire contest.Eventually, after hours of holding serve, Isner finally won the 137th game of the fifth set to move ahead, before breaking Mahut in the following game to end the marathon at 70-68.The complete score read 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 70-68, with the match lasting 665 minutes, or 11 hours and five minutes.The final set alone was longer than the longest baseball game on record, which lasted eight hours and six minutes.The 183 games played overall were also 71 more than the previous highest total at Wimbledon, while the 138 games in the fifth set were 26 more than had been played in any other match.Isner and Mahut had also eclipsed the previous record for aces in a match, which had stood at 78, with their combined total of 215."I have never seen anything like it," Isner said afterwards, while the scale of what had happened was summed up by his prediction that "Nothing like this will ever happen again, ever."

Neither player was quite the same afterwards

The physical demands of the match became obvious immediately.Isner returned to the court for his second-round match against Dutchman Thiemo de Bakker, but lost in straight sets, with the effects of the three-day battle clearly still hanging over him.Mahut's defeat was equally extraordinary in its own way. Despite losing, he had produced one of the most remarkable individual performances in tennis history, with the two players setting records for points, games and aces that were unlikely to be approached again.The appeal of the match was not simply the final score, however, because as the fifth set moved beyond 50-50, both players were visibly exhausted while continuing to produce the physical effort required to keep the contest alive. Mahut repeatedly chased balls at full stretch, while Isner was visibly struggling between points, yet neither could find the small lapse that would finally end the contest.The fact that it was a first-round match on an outside court made the spectacle even stranger, with two players who were not among the sport's biggest global stars suddenly becoming the centre of attention as word spread about what was happening on Court 18.The match was so extraordinary that Wimbledon later commemorated it with a plaque outside Court 18.

A plaque commemorating the Isner–Mahut match on Court 18 at Wimbledon/Wikipedia

Isner and Mahut met again in the first round at Wimbledon in 2011, but there was no repeat marathon, with Isner winning in straight sets.

The record changed tennis

The Isner-Mahut marathon was possible because of the Grand Slam rules in place at the time, which required the final set to continue until one player established a two-game advantage.That system has since changed at the major tournaments, making another 70-68 deciding set increasingly difficult to imagine.Wimbledon now uses a tie-break when the final set reaches 12-12, while the Australian Open uses a first-to-10-point super tie-break at 6-6. The French Open has also retained the advantage-set principle in its deciding sets.Isner himself would later find himself at the centre of another Wimbledon marathon. In the 2018 semi-finals, he lost to South Africa's Kevin Anderson 7-6, 6-7, 7-6, 4-6, 24-26 after six hours and 36 minutes.That match became the fourth-longest in tennis history and the second-longest at a Grand Slam, but the repeated marathon matches contributed to Wimbledon eventually introducing its fifth-set tie-break.Other records remain well behind Isner and Mahut's mark. The longest Grand Slam final in the Open Era was the 2012 Australian Open final, where Novak Djokovic defeated Rafael Nadal 5-7, 6-4, 6-2, 6-7, 7-5 after five hours and 53 minutes.The longest women's singles match lasted six hours and 31 minutes, with Vicki Nelson beating Jean Hepner 6-4, 7-6 at the 1984 Central Fidelity Banks International tournament.The longest doubles match came at the 2013 Davis Cup, when Tomas Berdych and Lukas Rosol defeated Switzerland's Stanislas Wawrinka and Marco Chiudinelli 6-4, 5-7, 6-4, 6-7, 24-22 after seven hours and two minutes.None came close to the 11-hour, three-day ordeal in south-west London.

From Wimbledon absurdity to HBO

The story eventually travelled well beyond tennis.The 2010 marathon helped inspire HBO's "7 Days in Hell", a mockumentary starring Andy Samberg and Kit Harington about two fictional tennis players locked in an impossibly long Grand Slam match.Samberg later recalled watching the real-life Isner-Mahut match with writer Murray Miller and joking that somebody should make a film about a tennis match that simply never ends.That joke became the 2015 HBO film, which exaggerated the premise to comic extremes, but its starting point was very real: two players, three days, 11 hours and five minutes, 183 games and a fifth set that reached 70-68 before anyone could finally walk off Court 18.More than 16 years later, the Isner-Mahut match remains the Guinness World Record holder for the longest professional tennis match ever played.