Venus Williams - People also ask
Venus Williams is a seven-time Grand Slam singles champion and four-time Olympic gold medallist who, at 46, accepted a wild card into the 2026 US Open singles main draw. She is the oldest woman in that draw since Renee Richards in 1981, and she is also back in the doubles with her sister Serena.
Venus Williams walked back onto Arthur Ashe Stadium on the opening night of the 2026 US Open at 46 years old, holding a wild card, playing the tournament she won in 2000 and 2001. She is the oldest woman in a US Open singles main draw since Renee Richards in 1981. Her first-round opponent, Sofia Kenin, is an all-American draw and a former Australian Open champion who has had her own difficult season, which made it one of the few genuinely unpredictable matches on the card.
The context matters more than the result. Williams turned professional in 1994, won her first Grand Slam at Wimbledon in 2000, and has now been playing top-level tennis across five decades of tennis calendars. Seven Grand Slam singles titles, 14 more in doubles with Serena, four Olympic golds and 49 tour titles is a career that closed a long time ago by any normal measure. The 2026 season is something else: a set of appearances she has chosen, at Roland-Garros in doubles with Hailey Baptiste, at Cincinnati alongside Serena, and now in New York in both draws.
Her ranking, around No. 479 in April 2026, tells you how little she has played rather than how she is hitting the ball. The last decade has been shaped by health: Sjogren’s syndrome, diagnosed in 2011, an autoimmune condition that left her too exhausted to train at times, and then years of pelvic pain that turned out to be uterine fibroids and an adenomyoma. She had surgery in 2024 and spoke about it publicly in 2025, largely to tell other women not to accept being told the pain was normal. That advocacy, alongside her long campaign for equal prize money at Wimbledon, is the part of her record that has nothing to do with a scoreboard.
Off court she runs EleVen, the activewear label she founded, and V Starr, an interior design firm in Florida. She married the Italian-Danish actor and producer Andrea Preti in Ischia in September 2025, then again in a Palm Beach courthouse for the paperwork. The doubles wild card with Serena, announced on August 26, is the sentimental headline of this US Open: the sisters back on the same side of the net at Flushing Meadows for the first time since 2022, at a tournament they have between them won six times in singles.