Serena Williams confirms stunning return to tennis ahead of Wimbledon at age of 44.
Serena Williams confirms stunning return to tennis ahead of Wimbledon at age of 44.
Serena Williams has confirmed that she will make a stunning return to tennis at the age of 44, almost four years after her last competitive appearance.
The 23-time grand slam champion has received a doubles wildcard to play at the HSBC Championships at the Queen’s Club in west London, which starts on Monday 8 June, ahead of a likely return at Wimbledon later in the month. She is set to play doubles at Queen’s with Canadian teenager Victoria Mboko, who idolized Williams growing up, and may play singles at Wimbledon.
After months of frenzied speculation, Queen’s Club posted on Monday: “The Queen returns! Serena Williams is back and set for doubles at the HSBC Championships.” At the same time, Williams posted the message, “Good news travels fast”, along with a video of her on court in an all-white Nike tennis dress and with her phone buzzing rapidly in the background. “Guess everybody heard the news,” the video added.
In a press release from the tournament, Williams said: “Queen’s Club feels like the perfect place to begin this next chapter. Grass has given me some of the most meaningful moments of my career, and I’m excited to be back competing on one of the sport’s most iconic stages.”
Williams, one of the sport’s defining champions and greatest players of all time, has not played competitively since the 2022 US Open, where she reached the third round in a glittering farewell. Before that tournament, the American carefully said she would be “evolving away from tennis, toward other things that are important to me”, rather than ever using the word “Retirement”.
Williams, who gave birth to her second child in 2023, sparked speculation that she would be returning to tennis when she re-entered the International Tennis Integrity Agency’s anti-doping testing pool last August, and she has been cleared to compete competitively since February 22.
A seven-time Wimbledon singles champion, as well as a six-time Wimbledon doubles champion with her sister Venus, the Championships are one of the most important tournaments in her hall-of-fame career. Her last appearance at Wimbledon came in a first-round defeat to Harmony Tan in 2022.
Laura Robson, the WTA tournament director at Queen’s Club, said: “Serena Williams is one of the greatest athletes the world has ever seen, and we’re delighted that she will be making her return to tennis at the LTA’s HSBC Championships.
“Women’s tennis made a historic return to The Queen’s Club last year, and now we have an icon of the game stepping back on to court at this prestigious venue – it’s very exciting for the tournament and the fans.”
Despite repeated denials from Williams, it had been an open secret for many months on tour that she was preparing to make a stunning return to tennis. Alycia Parks, the American player, revealed in February that she had practiced with Williams, adding: “She is in great shape, so I think she would kill it on tour.”
Videos of Williams on court emerged while she has become a prominent user of injectable weight-loss drugs. The 44-year-old is a spokesperson for the healthcare provider Ro and said in a Super Bowl commercial that she was “healthier, stronger, moving better, and feeling better” because of losing 34lb (15.4kg) in a year using GLP-1s. Her husband, the Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, is an early investor in Ro.