Venus Williams walked off court in Washington on Wednesday night without a win, and next week she will walk onto one in Toronto anyway. That gap between what the results say and what tournaments keep offering her is the real story of her 2026 season. Williams lost 6-3, 6-3 to Austria’s Anastasia Potapova in the first round of the Mubadala DC Open, a match she had entered on a main-draw wild card.
It was her 12th consecutive singles loss, a run stretching back to the summer of 2025. She was 0-9 at that point in the year and had won four of 22 sets. Her ranking sits outside the world’s top 450.
The numbers from Wednesday were split in a familiar way. Williams won 78% of the points behind her first serve, which is a figure most players on tour would take. She won 24% behind her second. She hit nine winners against 19 unforced errors. Potapova, who had never won a match in Washington before this week, did not face a break point.
None of that changed her schedule. Williams is already confirmed as a main-draw wild card at the National Bank Open in Toronto, which opens Aug. 1 at Sobeys Stadium. Hers was the first of the tournament’s eight women’s singles wild cards to be announced, and she is the only recipient who is not Canadian. Tennis Canada has since filled the remaining places with a Canadian contingent. The tournament’s own homepage has been promoting her appearance to ticket buyers for weeks. She was the runner-up in Toronto in 2014.
The larger decision belongs to the USTA, and it has not been made. Williams is not on the US Open direct-entry list published July 21, which cut off at No. 102 in the WTA rankings using the July 20 figures. The remaining main-draw places will be filled by qualifying and by wild cards awarded at the association’s discretion. One American women’s wild card is spoken for through a separate mechanism, the US Open Wild Card Challenge, a points race among lower-ranked Americans that runs through Aug. 9. Williams is not part of that competition. Any place for her would be a judgment call, and it would be made by an administration barely a week old. Craig Tiley began work as USTA chief executive on July 20 after 21 years at Tennis Australia. New York will be his first US Open in the role.
Her sister’s position is similarly unresolved. Serena Williams is also absent from the direct-entry list, and her own route to New York still runs through a wild card.
Venus Williams has not said publicly whether she will seek a place at Flushing Meadows, and her answers this week suggested a player keeping her options loose rather than announcing them. Asked in Washington about a doubles partnership with Alexandra Eala that had been announced and then quietly replaced, she offered a shrug of an explanation.
“We had a great time playing at Bad Homburg so we were looking forward to playing again,” she said. “Didn’t work out this time. Would love for there to be future times. We’ll see what happens.”
She is instead playing doubles in Washington with Diana Shnaider, and that draw is still alive. The pair face Tang Qianhui and Xu Yifan in the quarterfinals, which gives Williams a second reason to still be on site.
What tournaments are buying, plainly, is not form. It is a seven-time Grand Slam champion, a four-time Olympic gold medalist and a name that fills a night session. Her most recent tour-level singles win came at this same Washington event a year ago, against Peyton Stearns, when she became the second-oldest woman to win a WTA Tour match. That result is now the load-bearing beam under every wild card she has received since.
Update, Aug. 3: The Toronto wild card produced the same result as the one in Washington. Kamilla Rakhimova, the world No. 82 from Uzbekistan, beat Williams 6-4, 6-1 on Sunday in a first-round match pushed back close to two hours by the rain that disrupted play across the region. Williams broke back to lead 4-3 in the opening set and could not convert two break points in the eighth game; she was broken three times in the second. The match lasted one hour, 27 minutes. She is now 0-10 in singles in 2026, and her ranking has slipped to No. 664. It was her 13th appearance at the Canadian Open, where she reached the 2014 final by beating her sister in the semifinals.
Williams did not hold a full news conference afterward, speaking only briefly with a tour representative and noting that the weather was beyond anyone’s control and that the crowd had stayed with her. Two things remain open. She has not been awarded a wild card for Cincinnati, so her presence at the last WTA 1000 before New York is unresolved. And she has said she would like to play doubles with her sister at the US Open, which would be a separate request from any singles wild card and has not been granted.
Toronto decided it was enough. New York has four weeks to decide the same thing. The US Open main draw begins Aug. 30.
