Serena Williams is in discussions about returning to competitive tennis at Queen's Club in London next month, four years after she played what most people believed was her final match.
According to BBC Sport, Williams is considering playing doubles at the WTA 500 event, which begins Monday, June 8. Nothing has been finalized. Williams would need a wildcard to enter, but two are available for the grass court tournament. One of those wildcards is reserved for a team that includes a former world number one, a Grand Slam champion from the past 10 years, or a current top-30 player.
The Served podcast, hosted by former men's world number one Andy Roddick, claimed Williams would play alongside 19-year-old Canadian Victoria Mboko. BBC Sport reported it had not yet been able to confirm that pairing.
Williams, now 44, has been eligible to return to competition since February 22, having completed six months back in the drug testing pool. Her last competitive match was a third-round loss to Australia's Ajla Tomljanovic at the 2022 US Open. At the time, the sporting world understood it as her farewell to the game. Williams herself preferred different language, saying she was "evolving away" from tennis rather than retiring.
Her 23 Grand Slam singles titles are the most by any woman in the Open era and second-highest all-time behind Margaret Court. She also won 14 major women's doubles titles alongside her sister Venus, and the pair claimed three Olympic gold medals in doubles. Williams won seven singles titles and seven doubles titles at Wimbledon, which begins three weeks after Queen's Club.
The potential return follows months of public speculation tied in part to interviews Williams gave about her physical condition. Last year, she told the Today Show in the United States that she had lost 31 pounds over eight months. She described having to look at her extra weight as "an opponent." Despite, in her words, "training five hours a day" and "running, walking, biking, stair climbing," she told the show she had no other choice but to "try something different."
Williams did not say which weight loss drug she was taking, though she had become a spokesperson for Ro, a company that sells GLP-1 brands including Wegovy and Zepbound. Her husband, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, is also an investor in the company. In a follow-up Today Show interview in January, she said she was "going to see what happens."
She told the show she was now training for a half-marathon and was "running farther than I ever had."
Queen's Club represents a meaningful location for any potential comeback. The grass surface there directly precedes Wimbledon on the calendar, and Williams has more titles at Wimbledon than at any other Grand Slam. Whether she steps onto the court there June 8 remains unconfirmed.
