Serena Williams and Venus Williams will play doubles together at the Cincinnati Open this month, reuniting the most decorated sister partnership in tennis for the first time since 2022. The tournament awarded the pair a wild card into the women’s doubles draw on Monday. Venus also received a singles wild card.
The WTA 1000 event runs Aug. 8-23 at the Lindner Family Tennis Center in Mason, Ohio. Community Weekend opens the schedule Aug. 8-9. Qualifying is played Aug. 11-12 and main-draw matches begin Aug. 13. Finals Weekend follows on Aug. 22-23, with both singles finals scheduled for Aug. 23. Neither sister has entered the Cincinnati Open as part of a doubles team before.
Their record together is otherwise extraordinary. They have won 14 major doubles titles and three Olympic gold medals, a haul that includes six Wimbledon championships. They last shared a doubles court at the 2022 US Open, in the week that closed the first phase of Serena’s career.
Serena’s return has moved quickly since she announced it on June 1. She played her first match in nearly four years on June 9 at the Queen’s Club Championships in London, partnering Victoria Mboko in doubles. Her singles comeback followed at Wimbledon, where she lost in the first round to Maya Joint of Australia. A knee injury sustained during that tournament forced the sisters out of the Wimbledon doubles draw before they could play a point together.
Cincinnati is the second attempt at that reunion, and the timing carries weight. It is the final WTA 1000 event before the US Open, and it sits directly on the ramp to Flushing Meadows. Serena has not entered the US Open singles draw. She has not ruled it out either. Venus has committed to New York in another form, entering the US Open mixed doubles alongside a field that has since swelled to 29 teams. She remains one title short of the all-time record of 24 major singles championships.
Venus arrives in Ohio with the deeper local history. She owns a 12-10 career record at the tournament, with a semifinal run in 2012 and a quarterfinal in 2019. She turned 46 in June. Her career includes 49 singles titles, seven majors and the 2000 Olympic gold medal, and she spent 11 weeks at No. 1 in the WTA rankings. Her first WTA Tour match came in 1994.
The sisters headline a wild-card class that leans heavily American. Sloane Stephens, the 2017 US Open champion and a Cincinnati semifinalist in 2013, returns to the tournament for the first time since 2023. Taylor Townsend, who won the Cincinnati doubles title in 2023, also received a singles wild card after reaching her first WTA Tour singles final in Austin and climbing back inside the top 100.
Caroline Dolehide, a two-time WTA finalist making her third Cincinnati singles appearance, and Elvina Kalieva, a New York City native who reached her first WTA semifinal last week in Memphis, completed the American contingent. Two international players rounded out the singles wild cards.
Darja Vidmanova of the Czech Republic reached her first WTA final last week in Memphis, the best result of her career. Lois Boisson of France, who last year became the first wild card in the Open era to reach the Roland Garros women’s singles semifinals, will make her Cincinnati debut. Qualifying wild cards went to Bianca Andreescu, the 2019 US Open champion, along with Akasha Urhobo, Carol Young Suh Lee, Jeline Vandromme and Robin Montgomery, the 21-year-old American who won her first WTA title in June.
The Williams pair enters a doubles field with real depth. Townsend and Katerina Siniakova, the world’s top-ranked team, headline the draw. The sisters carry no team ranking and no seeding, which leaves open the possibility of an early meeting with a leading pair. On the men’s side, the tournament earlier awarded wild cards to Stan Wawrinka, Gael Monfils, Grigor Dimitrov and Jack Draper.
What Cincinnati offers the sisters is harder to measure on a scoreboard. Serena is 44. Venus is 46. Their partnership produced a decade of dominance that changed what the doubles court looked like, and it has been dormant for four years. A first-round loss would not alter that record. A single completed match would give them something Wimbledon did not.
The tournament has not announced when the sisters will play. Doubles draws are typically released in the days before main-draw action begins, and the full WTA field for Cincinnati continues to firm up as the US Open swing approaches.
