By HOWARD FENDRICH
NEW YORK (AP) — Even at age 45, even after two years away from Grand Slam tennis, Venus Williams displayed some huge serves and highly effective groundstrokes on the U.S. Open on Monday evening in entrance of a supportive crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium, earlier than dropping 6-3, 2-6, 6-1 to Karolina Muchova.
Williams was the oldest singles participant on the hard-court event since Renee Richards was 47 in 1981.
“She’s such a legend of our sport,” 2023 French Open runner-up Muchova stated about seven-time Grand Slam singles champion Williams, including that it was an honor “to share a court with her.”
In simply the fourth match of a comeback that started final month after greater than a yr off the tour, Williams didn’t precisely get to ease into issues Monday: Muchova, a 29-year-old from the Czech Republic, was seeded eleventh in New York and made it to the semifinals there in each 2023 — when she misplaced to eventual champion Coco Gauff in a match interrupted by a local weather protest — and 2024.
So maybe it wasn’t stunning that Williams began slowly, ceding 11 of the preliminary 13 factors and falling behind 2-0. With members of the gang shouting, “Let’s go, Venus!” and roaring after her winners — and her fiance, Andrea Preti, leaping out of his seat — Williams took three video games in a row to go forward 3-2
Muchova grabbed the subsequent 4 video games to say that set, which ended with Williams hitting 4 of her night’s 10 double-faults to get damaged.
However Williams, who smacked serves at as much as 114 mph and completed with only one fewer winner than Muchova, broke to start the second set on her method to tying the match.
Within the third set, although, as the competition reached two hours, Muchova was just too good.
When the match ended, Williams left the courtroom with a wave as followers rose to salute somebody whose first U.S. Open title arrived a full quarter of a century in the past.
Extra just lately, Williams was off the tennis tour for 16 months till getting into a event in Washington final month, the place she received one match every in singles and doubles. She hadn’t competed wherever because the Miami Open in March 2024, and had surgical procedure for uterine fibroids later final yr.
The U.S. Tennis Affiliation awarded wild playing cards to Williams for each the combined doubles occasion final week and singles.
She hasn’t received a match on the U.S. Open in singles since 2019, when she acquired to the second spherical. Since then, Williams exited within the first spherical in 2020, 2022 and 2023, and missed the event in 2021 and 2024.
She received singles championships at Flushing Meadows in 2000 and 2001, and one other 5 at Wimbledon.
Since making her skilled debut in 1994, Williams additionally collected 14 Grand Slam trophies in girls’s doubles alongside her youthful sister, Serena, plus two in combined doubles, earned a document 5 Olympic tennis medals and reached No. 1 within the WTA rankings.
Via the years, each siblings transcended their sport and have become far more than profitable athletes. Serena, who received 23 Grand Slam singles titles, performed her final match on the 2022 U.S. Open.
“She’s Venus Williams. She’s so iconic in so many different ways,” stated Frances Tiafoe, an American participant who received his first-round match in Ashe earlier Monday. “She’s won so much. And to see how much she loves game still at her age is amazing. It’s amazing to still see her out here.”
It was on the U.S. Open greater than a decade in the past that Williams revealed she had been identified with Sjögren’s syndrome, an energy-sapping auto-immune illness that may trigger joint ache.
Some thought she may go away her sport due to that, however she remained a number one determine — on and off the courtroom. To her followers — for years, and positively on Monday evening — it by no means mattered that she now has exited within the first or second spherical in every of her previous 13 appearances at main tournaments.
When she was requested on the Washington event in July why she was nonetheless competing, she supplied a easy reply: “Why not?”
“I want to be my best, and that’s the expectation I have for myself: to get the best out of me. And that’s all any player can ask for,” Williams stated Saturday, the day earlier than the beginning of singles play on the U.S. Open. “I haven’t played as much as the other players, so it’s a different challenge when you’re dealing with that. So I’m just trying to have fun, stay relaxed and be my personal best.”
Initially Printed: August 25, 2025 at 8:10 PM PDT
