Tennis Canada closed its women’s singles wild-card allocation for the National Bank Open on Sunday, awarding the final two main-draw invitations to Carol Zhao and Ariana Arseneault and confirming that Serena Williams will not return to singles competition in Toronto.

The pair join Venus Williams, Bianca Andreescu, Cadence Brace, Kayla Cross, Rebecca Marino and Katherine Sebov on a list of eight wild cards, seven of them Canadian. The main draw at Sobeys Stadium begins Saturday, with the Toronto draw ceremony set for Friday and play spread across a 12-day format. Williams does not hold a ranking that would permit direct entry into a WTA 1000 main draw, so an invitation was her only route in. With all eight now allocated, that route is closed.

What the tournament said. Valérie Tétreault, vice-president of communications at Tennis Canada and the Toronto tournament director, told L’Équipe on July 22 that talks with the player’s team were continuing and her recovery was being monitored daily. “For now, no final decision has been made,” she said, adding that all options remained on the table. That remains the last on-record tournament comment about her participation. Sunday’s announcement made no reference to Williams; Noelle van Lottum, Tennis Canada’s head of women’s tennis, framed the final two invitations around the strength of the Canadian contingent, noting the federation was “delighted to award main-draw wild cards to Ariana and Carol.”

What has not been said. No statement has been issued by Williams or her representatives, and Tennis Canada has not described an invitation as having been extended and refused. Some coverage has characterised the outcome as a declined offer. Nothing on the record supports that framing. The verifiable sequence is narrower: the tournament kept its options open on July 22, then gave its last two singles wild cards to Canadian players four days later.

The injury context. Williams hurt her right knee during a first-round loss to Maya Joint at Wimbledon on July 1, her first singles match since 2022, and withdrew from the doubles event she had been due to play with her sister. No fresh setback has been reported since. Her most recent public comment on the knee, made this month, indicated improvement rather than a new problem.

What is left of the runway. The Cincinnati Open runs from August 11, with main-draw play beginning August 13 and finals weekend on August 22 and 23. Its published entry list covers the entire top 10 and 75 of the top 77 in the WTA rankings; Williams is not among the direct entries, and the tournament has not announced main-draw wild cards. The US Open singles main draw begins August 30, with direct entry cut at No. 102 on the July 20 rankings. Williams does not appear on that entry list either, leaving a USTA wild card as her route into Flushing Meadows. Those two allocations are now the only remaining paths to a competitive hard-court singles match before New York — the scenario mapped out when three wild-card routes were still open to her.

Commentary, not confirmation. Jon Wertheim reported on July 13 that both sisters were expected in Toronto and that “Cincinnati is entirely possible as a next stop.” The first half of that has since been overtaken by events, and the second was offered before the Cincinnati field was published. It remains commentary rather than confirmed entry.

Doubles. Tennis Canada announced doubles wild cards alongside the singles allocation, pairing Leylah Annie Fernandez with her sister Bianca Jolie Fernandez and Andreescu with Cross. Williams was not among them. Whether further doubles invitations remain available has not been stated, so a low-load return in that draw cannot be ruled out on the record — but it is no longer simply an open door.

The practical effect is a divergence between two summers that had been moving in parallel. Venus Williams holds a Toronto main-draw place and has been building a doubles schedule through the American swing. Serena, four years on from her last competitive season and one match into a comeback, arrives at the start of the hard-court swing with no scheduled tennis and a single tournament left that could give her one. The comeback is not over. Its preparation window is now measured in days rather than weeks.

Related coverage: The Williams sisters and their impact on professional tennis and what the medication rules actually say.

Naomi Osaka has spent eight years being told what she means to tennis. On Sunday, sitting in front of reporters at the Mubadala DC Open, she offered a quietly startling correction: she never asked for any of it. “I actually don’t really want to be famous,” Osaka said during media day at Rock Creek Park, adding that she is content with exactly where she is.

It is not a throwaway line. It arrives at the precise moment Osaka’s public profile has expanded past the sport that created it — and at the start of the six-week stretch that will define whether her comeback is a nostalgia act or a genuine return to the top of the women’s game.

The peak that kept moving

Osaka reached for a specific memory to explain how strange the last decade has felt. When she won Indian Wells in March 2018 — her first WTA title, a straight-sets win over Daria Kasatkina — she assumed she had arrived at the summit. The prize money meant her mother, who had been working constantly, could stop.

“I felt like that was peak,” she said. Then came the US Open. Then a second, and a third, and a fourth major. Then the world No. 1 ranking, the endorsement portfolio, the magazine covers, the activism, the withdrawal, the motherhood, the return. Every time the ground appeared to level out, Osaka said, something else happened.

That is a familiar arc for a generational athlete. What is unusual is Osaka’s refusal to describe it as ambition fulfilled. She has never considered herself famous, she told reporters — which is either the most grounded thing a four-time Grand Slam champion has said this year, or a reminder of how completely the machinery around a star can operate without their consent.

When the clothes started talking

The second half of Osaka’s answer was the more revealing one. Across all three Grand Slams in 2026, her walk-on outfits have generated more coverage than several players’ results. She has become, by her own account, better known to the fashion world than to tennis fans — people know her now for the fashion, she said, more than the tennis.

For most athletes that would be a complaint. Osaka framed it as an unexpected trade. She has always described herself as an introvert; the outfits, she noted with some irony, have forced her to speak far more often, and about subjects she is not remotely an expert in. The clothes did what a decade of press conferences could not — they pulled her into conversations, and rooms, she would otherwise never have entered.

It is a genuinely novel account of athlete celebrity. The standard version is that fame is the tax you pay on performance. Osaka is describing something closer to the reverse: a deliberate aesthetic project that functions as a social prosthetic, letting a reticent person participate in her own stardom on terms she sets.

Not everyone is buying it

That reading has its sceptics inside the locker room. Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, speaking to TennisBolshe earlier this month, was unpersuaded — arguing that a player who walks out in such outfits cannot then claim to want no attention.

It is a fair challenge, and it exposes the tension Osaka is trying to hold. She is simultaneously the most visually conspicuous player on tour and the one insisting she would rather not be looked at. Both things can be true — visibility and celebrity are not the same currency — but the distinction is a fine one, and it will keep being tested every time she walks onto a stadium court in something the internet cannot ignore.

The part that actually decides her year

Underneath the wardrobe conversation sits a harder set of numbers. Osaka arrives in Washington ranked No. 13, on the back of the strongest major of her comeback: a first career Wimbledon quarter-final, and one she left disappointed by, believing a deeper run had been available. That result confirmed she can still live in the second week of a Slam. It did not resolve whether she can do it consistently.

She currently sits outside the WTA Finals qualification zone — alongside Iga Swiatek, Victoria Mboko and Marta Kostyuk — with Washington, Toronto, Cincinnati and the US Open ahead. It is the densest stretch of the calendar, and Osaka enters it carrying the most difficult burden in tennis: expectation that has been reset upward by a single good fortnight.

The comeback has already outlasted the sceptics. The Wimbledon run made it credible. What happens over the next six weeks on North American hard courts — the surface on which she won all four of her majors — determines whether 2026 is remembered as the year Osaka got competitive again, or the year she got interesting again.

She would presumably prefer the former. The rest of the world, judging by the traffic her outfits generate, seems to have already chosen.

The short answer to the question following Serena Williams around her comeback is no. The class of medication the 23-time Grand Slam champion has said she uses is not prohibited under tennis anti-doping rules, and never has been. The longer answer is that tennis knows the rule may not stay that way, and the sport’s integrity chief said as much on Sunday.

Karen Moorhouse, chief executive of the International Tennis Integrity Agency, was asked about weight-loss drugs on the “Off Court with Greg Rusedski” podcast and pointed the question upward. The ITIA administers the anti-doping program across professional tennis but does not decide what goes on the banned list. That is the World Anti-Doping Agency’s job, and Moorhouse said tennis would follow WADA’s lead and its scientific expertise on whether the drugs offer a competitive benefit. She called it a genuinely interesting area and said it was right that WADA is examining it.

What Williams has actually disclosed matters here, because the specifics have been blurred in circulation. In an August 2025 interview timed to a paid partnership with the telehealth company Ro, Williams said she had lost 31 pounds using a GLP-1 receptor agonist after struggling to reach a healthy weight following the births of her two daughters. She has consistently declined to name a brand. Her husband, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, is an investor in Ro and sits on its board. Several outlets have since named a specific product; none of those attributions trace back to Williams herself.

Under the 2026 WADA Prohibited List, GLP-1 receptor agonists are not banned, in or out of competition, and no therapeutic use exemption is required to take them. They sit one tier below that, on WADA’s Monitoring Program, which tracks substances that are not prohibited but are being watched for patterns of misuse. Markers of semaglutide have been monitored since 2024; from Jan. 1, 2026, markers of tirzepatide were added, monitored both in and out of competition.

Monitoring carries no sanction. It is a data-gathering step, and substances typically sit there for several years before WADA either prohibits them or drops them. For a substance to be added to the list, WADA requires it to meet at least two of three criteria: performance enhancement, health risk, or a violation of the spirit of sport.

The ADHD question that surfaced in the same interview is governed by an entirely separate rule, and the two should not be run together. Stimulants prescribed for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, including methylphenidate, are prohibited in competition and do require a therapeutic use exemption. Moorhouse pushed back firmly on a perception she said circulates within the sport, that large numbers of players hold such exemptions, calling it flatly untrue and noting that an ADHD exemption requires two independent experts to confirm the diagnosis before the ITIA’s TUE committee will consider it.

The most-cited case remains Fernando Verdasco, the former world No. 7, who accepted a two-month voluntary provisional suspension in 2022 after testing positive for methylphenidate, having let his exemption lapse. There is no public indication that Williams has ever taken ADHD medication or applied for an exemption for one. The subjects converged in a podcast, not in her file.

Williams has her own recent history with the machinery. She re-entered the ITIA registered testing pool in October, denied a comeback was coming, then completed the mandatory six months of out-of-competition availability and became eligible to compete again on Feb. 22. Ahead of Wimbledon she described the whereabouts system as grueling and unprofessional, objecting that a missed test outside her designated hour can still count against her.

For an American audience, the stakes are at Flushing Meadows. Williams played doubles at Berlin and Queen’s Club in June, lost her Wimbledon opener to Maya Joint on June 30, then withdrew from doubles with Venus with a knee problem. She does not appear in the fields for Washington, Montreal or Cincinnati. Coach Rennae Stubbs has said the intention is the US Open if the body holds up. The rulebook, for now, poses no obstacle.