WIMBLEDON, England — Lindsay Davenport has been coming to Wimbledon, the world’s most prestigious tennis championship, for more than 20 years, but she had never seen anything quite like the second day of this year’s tournament.

Davenport, a champion at Wimbledon in 1999, played the tournament 13 times before retiring in 2009 and had come to expect that women would consistently be given less time on the tournament’s biggest stages. Each day of the first week of Wimbledon, with few exceptions in recent decades, three matches are scheduled for each of the two largest show courts: Centre Court (capacity 14,979, according to the media guide) and No. 1 Court (capacity 11,393). Customarily, two are men’s matches and one is a women’s match.

The distribution is more equal at the other three Grand Slam events.

“As a female, I was very aware of those kind of things, that there’s only two women’s matches on Centre and No. 1 Court,” Davenport said. “If you didn’t have a tough opponent, even if you were No. 1 or the defending champion, you most likely weren’t going to go on those two courts.”

But Tuesday, the ratio flipped unexpectedly: Two women’s matches and one men’s match were assigned to each court.