Follow The Athletic’s Wimbledon coverageWelcome to the Wimbledon briefing, where The Athletic will explain the stories behind the stories on each day of the tournament.On Day 2, a defending champion rode a roller coaster, one player blocked out the haters and a whole lot of women’s seeds escaped jeopardy.How did a defending champion serve up a roller coaster?At the venue where she settled into the best serving rhythm of her career last year, Iga Świątek offered another reminder Tuesday of why the shot is such a bellwether for her game.Świątek has struggled badly with her serve for much of the year. She made a slight adjustment in the spring, bending her right arm at the elbow earlier in her swing to abbreviate it and try to get more power. But it remains too prone to providing a platform for her baseline game one moment and destabilizing it the next.She has longed to return it to the potency of last year’s Wimbledon run, when she won a tournament-leading 90 percent of her service games.Back at the All England Club as the defending champion, Świątek had a mind-bending day with the serve in her first-round match against Taylor Townsend on Tuesday. Having worked effectively in the first set, it plumbed such depths that it looked as though Świątek was about to become just the third defending Wimbledon women’s champion since the start of the Open Era in 1968 to lose in the first round.Three storylines to watch at WimbledonMatt FuttermanThe 25-year-old from Poland hit four double faults in the second set, including one on the way to being broken for 1-0, and then a couple more as Townsend went up 3-0. She looked to be having issues with her toss, and as can happen with Świątek, once the serve went, the rest of her game spiraled, with errors leaking from the baseline and seemingly every adjustment she tried not working.She also generally served with too much predictability, very rarely deviating from hitting to the Townsend backhand or occasionally to the body. On the ad side, Świątek hit just two serves to the widest third of the box on Townsend’s forehand side all match, according to data from the All England Lawn Tennis Club Tennis Insights Service.But Świątek found her rhythm again in the third set and was able to exert enough pressure on Townsend to close out a 6-1, 2-6, 6-3 win.With her father and sister watching on in the Royal Box, Świątek was tearful when the match finished. She explained, in a news conference afterward, that the emotion of opening proceedings on Day 2 as the defending champion, per tournament tradition, had been a big factor in the additional stress she was feeling.Świątek said that those tensions crystallized in the serve. “You can sometimes see (the tension) on the serve,” she said. “The quality goes down. But I think you can see that in many players, because serve is the most complicated motion. It’s easy to mess it up a little bit.”Świątek will next test the quality of her serving against one of the game’s best: 2021 Wimbledon finalist Karolína Plíšková of the Czech Republic.— Charlie EccleshareWhy did one player put in some earplugs?Earlier this year, British wild card Arthur Fery started using earplugs to block out the noise during one of his matches. And on Tuesday at Wimbledon, he went low-key viral for using them to block out the complaints of his opponent, Bosnian Damir Džumhur, in his first-round comeback win.After taking the first set 6-3, Džumhur was fuming when a let was not called by umpire Greg Allensworth on one of his serves during the second set.“It’s very tough to play with somebody who doesn’t do his job good,” Džumhur, who went on to win just three games after his outburst in a 3-6, 6-2, 6-2, 6-1 defeat, shouted.“I am sure you are aware of it, I don’t know if you play tennis or not, I don’t know how big this is for every player, but here they have to be at the highest level.”During Džumhur’s rant, Fery put bright orange earplugs in as he tucked into some fruit.