Padel as a sport has its origins in 1969 in the Mexican seaside resort of Acapulco. The founder of padel and the inventor of padel was Enrique Corcuera. This is because he wanted to build a tennis court but did not have enough space and then the new sport of paddle arose instead. By building a plan that was 10×20 meters large and surrounded by walls, he succeeded with a net that divided the playing field into two equal sides to invent the first paddle court. Because the paddle court was smaller than the traditional plan, he also made sure that instead of playing with tennis rackets, he played with wooden rackets from the already invented sport of paddle tennis. To play, they used the walls as in squash and all the walls were involved in the game.
Since Enrique was a rich businessman, only the sport of paddle was played by the Mexican elite at first, but through a Spanish friend Alfonso De Hohenlohe, the sport of paddle also ended up in Spain. It was the start of paddle becoming big in Spain, but it started relatively easily with De Hohenlohe introducing the sport of paddle in Marbella. After adjusting the rules to some extent, the first European paddle club was founded there in 1974. The paddle thus came to Spain in the 70s. Here too, it was initially only De Hohenlohe’s wealthy friends who played and the breakthrough was delayed until the Spanish king Juan Carlos and the former Wimbledon champion Manolo Santana started marketing the sport. These succeeded well in getting the interest to increase markedly and the sport of paddle rose rapidly in popularity. The next step for the paddle was to bring paddle as a sport to Argentina through another friend of De Hohenlohe named Julio Menditengui.
Once in Argentina, paddle has grown into a national sport that has laid the foundation for more than 2 million players and tens of thousands of courses. The development has also been strong in Spain and already in the 90s they reached one million players. Even today, Spain and Argentina are also the most successful countries in terms of official and international competitions around the world. The first world championship was played in the Spanish city of Seville in 1992 with teams from eleven different countries from both Europe and America participating.
To take us further to what padel is today, we can state that in 2012 the World Padel Tour was created which is now the basis for the world elite and the competitions that take place around the world in countries such as Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Italy and exciting enough for some years back in time also in Sweden!
In padel you win points if:
