Serena Williams is back on a tennis court, and the sport is still adjusting to the idea. The 23-time Grand Slam singles champion, now 44, played her first competitive match in nearly four years this week at the Queen’s Club, partnering Canadian teenager Victoria Mboko in the women’s doubles and winning their opener 7-6(2), 6-2 against third seeds Nicole Melichar-Martinez and Erin Routliffe.
The fairytale was brief. Mboko slipped and injured the medial collateral ligament in her left knee in a separate singles match, forcing the pair to withdraw before their quarter-final and leaving Williams’ first event back ended almost as soon as it began. Mboko was warm in her thanks, calling it an “incredible opportunity” and expressing hope the two could “finish what we started.”
The road back — Williams’ return had been quietly building for months. After officially retiring following the 2022 US Open, she re-entered the International Tennis Integrity Agency’s testing pool late last year — a mandatory first step for any retired player wanting the option to compete — and was listed as reinstated, eligible to play, from late February 2026. She had publicly dismissed comeback talk as recently as December, but the paperwork told a different story.
Off court, her return has been wrapped up in a wider conversation about athlete health and weight-loss medication. Williams appeared in a Super Bowl advertisement for the telehealth company Ro, whose board includes her husband Alexis Ohanian, and has spoken about using a GLP-1 drug. Those medications are not banned in tennis but sit on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s monitoring programme, a status worth tracking now that she is back in the testing pool.
The question now is what comes next. Reports before the tournament indicated Williams was also lining up an appearance at the grass-court event in Berlin, and the prospect of a reunion with sister Venus — her partner for 14 major doubles titles — has long tantalized fans. With the Mboko partnership cut short, both of those threads are, for the moment, unresolved. What is clear is that one of the greatest players in the sport’s history is once again a competitor, and the grass season has given her comeback its first, fleeting chapter.
