Sustaining your form to the end of the season is a challenge that can prove beyond even some of the greatest Wimbledon champions. As the best female players of 2016 – with the exception of the injured Serena Williams – contest the year-ending Women’s Tennis Association Finals in Singapore this week, all eight singles competitors should fancy their chances given the history of the event.

Since it began life as the Virginia Slims Championships in 1972, the tournament has been staged 45 times, yet only seven players have claimed the title in the same year as winning at the All England Club. Chris Evert, Billie Jean King and Evonne Goolagong Cawley are among the players who never achieved that feat.
If ever there was a year when you might have expected the Wimbledon champion to round off her season in appropriate fashion it was 1988, when Steffi Graf enjoyed one of the most remarkable campaigns of any player in history. When she arrived in New York for the season-ending climax in November she had not lost a match for seven months.

Graf, whose only two losses that year were against Sabatini in the final in Amelia Island and Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario in the final of the French Open, beat Navratilova 6-4, 7-5, 2-6, 6-2 at the year-end event, where the final was played over five sets between 1984 and 1998. The German went on to complete the Wimbledon-year-end finals double three more times, in 1993, 1995 and 1996.

The only player with a better record in terms of winning those two titles in the same year is Navratilova, who did the double in 1978, 1979, 1983, 1984, 1985 and 1986. In 1986 the Virginia Slims Championships were staged in both March and November as the tournament moved in the calendar. Navratilova won the title both times and suffered only three defeats in her 92 matches that year.

Evert had won the first Virginia Slims Championships in 1972 and went on to win the title three more times (in 1973, 1975 and 1977) but never in the same year as her triumphs at The Championships (in 1974, 1976 and 1981). King, six times a singles champion at the All England Club, never got beyond the last four in her five appearances in the year-end finals.

Serena Williams is the only other player to have won both Wimbledon and the year-end championships in the same year on more than one occasion, having done so in 2009 and 2012. Four other players have performed the feat just once: Lindsay Davenport in 1999, Maria Sharapova in 2004, Venus Williams in 2008 and Petra Kvitova in 2011.