Serena Williams to make tennis comeback at Queen’s

Serena Williams is planning a sensational comeback on the grass courts of Queen’s Club in 10 days’ time.

The 23-time grand slam singles champion, generally agreed to be the greatest player of the modern age, has been out of the game since an emotional departure at the 2022 US Open.

But Williams – who is 44 – re-entered the anti-doping testing pool last year, in the first significant hint that she was ready to reconsider.

Now, having completed her mandatory six-month period in that pool, the American is understood to have asked for a wild card into the Lawn Tennis Association’s flagship event in London.

For the moment, it is believed that Williams has only applied to enter the doubles draw.

For a player of Serena Williams’s vintage, doubles is a much easier discipline to pursue than singles. For context, the apparently ageless Martina Navratilova was 49 when she won her final major – a mixed-doubles Wimbledon crown alongside fellow American Bob Bryan – in the summer of 2006. By contrast, Navratilova’s last singles major came in 1990, when she was only 33.

Nevertheless, Williams is understood to have such unshakeable self-belief that she fancies the idea of facing the best singles players in the world. In Melbourne in January, the chat around the commentary boxes was that some of her old peers, now working behind the microphone, had received text messages to the effect of “Let me at ‘em!”. This doubles appearance seems to represent a toe in the water, as a step towards a possible singles return if all goes well.

Brief as it might be, the grass-court season would give Williams the best opportunity to stage a singles coup. Not only does grass lend itself to shorter rallies than hard courts or clay – a bonus for someone of her age – but it also favours players with powerful serves: an area where Williams has always stood head and shoulders above her rivals.

Williams has been secretive about her plans, refusing to confirm any rumours, and writing in a social media post last December: “I’m NOT coming back. This wildfire is crazy.” However, she has shared footage of herself practising with quality hitting partners, including world No 79 Alycia Parks and former ATP player Jesse Levine.

While tennis chat might be off the agenda, Williams has been contrastingly open about her recent weight loss, which she ascribes to the use of a GLP-1 drug – Zepbound – that works in a similar way to Ozempic or Mounjaro. The drug is marketed by Ro, an American healthcare provider where her husband, Alexis Ohanian, sits on the board. She says that Zepbound has helped her lose 31 pounds, and succeeded where any amount of running, biking and step-machine training had previously failed.

“There’s a scene in my HBO documentary where you see my coach telling me, ‘You have to lose weight’,” Williams told Vogue last year. “But it was so hard after I had [my first daughter] Olympia… My whole life is being in the gym, working out, running, training, HIIT training, dancing, every single thing you can think of. I would always get to a certain point on the scale, but I could never get below that. That’s when I decided that it was time to try something different and got on the GLP-1 with Ro.”

Williams gave birth to Olympia in September 2017, having won the Australian Open while eight or nine weeks pregnant earlier the same year. After a maternity break lasting almost 18 months, she reached another four slam finals over the next five seasons, but could not snare that elusive 24th major title which would have equalled Margaret Court’s record. A second daughter, Adira, followed in 2023.

Now Williams will follow several other major tennis names – many of them also mothers, but none as famous as her – by making a comeback after announcing her retirement. Kim Clijsters and Caroline Wozniacki, both good friends of Williams, have been down this road, although neither found it easy to reproduce their old form.

Williams’s interest in Queen’s implies that she will probably feature at Wimbledon this summer, where her final match in 2022 was a disappointing three-set loss to world No 115 Harmony Tan.

Whether Williams appears in singles or doubles probably depends on how her initial venture with Mboko plays out. But June 17 – the date when the All England Club will announce their first batch of wild cards for the tournament – is already shaping up as a red-letter day for the tennis summer.

Click here to read article