This weekend, one champion will lift a golden cup crowned with a pineapple nobody can explain, and another will hold aloft a silver dish named after the wrong goddess. Wimbledon’s trophies are the strangest in major sports, and the strangeness is entirely genuine: the Gentlemen’s Singles Trophy (1887) is topped by a small pineapple whose origin the All England Club itself cannot document, and the Ladies’ prize, the Venus Rosewater Dish (1886), actually depicts Temperantia, the goddess of moderation, sitting on a barrel of wine.
Neither winner keeps their trophy. Both originals live at the All England Club year-round; the champions fly home with three-quarter-size replicas, a detail that surprises almost everyone who learns it, and one both trophies share with the World Cup. What the champions do keep is the engraving: their names join a list that has been accumulating on this same silverware since Queen Victoria’s reign.
The chart below covers both trophies: the essentials side by side, the pineapple mystery and its competing theories, the Venus dish decoded figure by figure, what winners actually receive, and the trivia engraved in the history. Take a look, then we’ll break it all down.
Contents
The pineapple: an unsolved case since 1887
The Gentlemen’s Singles Trophy, silver gilt, about eighteen and a half inches, purchased for 100 guineas in 1887, is one of the most photographed objects in sports, and the small pineapple on its lid remains genuinely unexplained. The All England Club itself offers no official origin. The leading theories are all plausibly Victorian: the pineapple as the era’s supreme status symbol (the fruit was so rare that hostesses rented them as centerpieces), as an old emblem of hospitality carved onto gateposts and silverware, as a nod to the naval tradition of sea captains displaying a pineapple to announce their safe return, or simply as the fashionable trophy-topper of 1880s silversmithing. The honest answer is that nobody wrote it down, and 139 years later the mystery has become the feature: every champion who lifts the cup is also lifting a question.
The dish that isn’t Venus
The Ladies’ Singles prize is even stranger under magnification. The Venus Rosewater Dish, awarded since 1886, is a silver gilt salver copied from a 16th-century design, and its central figure is not Venus at all but Temperantia, the classical personification of moderation, holding a lamp and surrounded by the four elements, with an outer ring depicting Minerva presiding over the seven liberal arts. Nor is it, functionally, a trophy: a rosewater dish was Renaissance banquet equipment, a basin for washing hands between courses. How the goddess of restraint on a hand-washing plate became the prize for tennis’s most ruthless fortnight is another Victorian decision nobody documented, but the object itself is magnificent, and the misnomer is now as traditional as the strawberries.
What champions keep, and why the originals stay
Neither trophy leaves the All England Club. Sunday’s champions will hold the originals for the photographs, see their names engraved onto them with startling speed, and fly home with three-quarter-size replicas, the same arrangement the World Cup uses, and for the same historical reason. Wimbledon learned it first: the club’s original men’s trophies were awarded under rules letting a triple champion keep the cup outright, and after losing two that way in the tournament’s first decade, the 1887 replacement came with a permanent declaration that it would never be won outright by anyone. The runner-up receives an inscribed silver plate; the prize money, covered in our full breakdown, arrives separately. What the engraving buys is the only thing the replicas can’t: permanent residence on silverware whose names begin in the reign of Queen Victoria, updated again this weekend.
Final Word
The Wimbledon trophies, explained: a silver gilt cup from 1887 crowned by a pineapple with no official explanation, and an 1886 rosewater dish named for Venus but starring Temperantia, both permanent residents of the All England Club, both represented in champions’ homes only by three-quarter replicas, both born of the hard lesson that great trophies must never be winnable for keeps. Two more names get engraved this weekend. The pineapple, presumably, keeps its secret.
What the champions bank alongside the silverware is in Wimbledon prize money by year, the names already on the trophies in Wimbledon champions by year, and the dress code they lift it in has its own story in why Wimbledon players wear white.