Update — Aug. 23, 2026: Serena’s US Open now has a shape. The USTA announced on Saturday that she will play the Mixed Doubles Championship with Carlos Alcaraz on a wild card, and that the last women’s singles wild card — held open for her — went to Sofia Kenin instead. She will not play singles in New York. There is no women’s doubles entry alongside Venus. The two days of mixed doubles, Aug. 25 and 26, are her US Open.
Serena and Venus Williams played a doubles match together on Monday night for the first time since the 2022 US Open, and for a set it looked like the kind of appearance that gets applauded rather than contested. Then it stopped looking like that. The sisters lost 2-6, 6-1, 8-10 to Marta Kostyuk and Peyton Stearns in the Cincinnati Open first round, and they lost it from the wrong end of a match tiebreak they had no business still being in.
Kostyuk and Stearns took the opening set without much resistance. The second went the other way almost as completely. In the match tiebreak the Ukrainian and the American opened a 6-0 lead, which in a first-to-10 format is close to a formality, and the Williams sisters came most of the way back before a double fault from Venus on match point ended it. It was their first doubles appearance together at a non-Grand Slam event since Rome in 2016, and the closest thing to competitive tennis either has produced as a pair in four years.
Venus, 46, told reporters afterward that the reunion had felt inevitable rather than planned. “Eventually we would find our way to each other,” she said. The two of them have 14 Grand Slam doubles titles and three Olympic golds as a team, all of it accumulated before either had a reason to talk about finding their way anywhere.
Their opponents were not a ceremonial draw. Kostyuk and Stearns are both 24 and were playing their first tournament as a team. Stearns grew up in Mason, the Cincinnati suburb where the Lindner Family Tennis Center sits, and spent the evening in the unusual position of being the hometown player the hometown crowd was rooting against. Kostyuk, a Wimbledon semifinalist this year, is the higher-ranked of the two and the reason the match had a competitive floor at all.
The pairing existed because the tournament made it exist. Serena and Venus entered Cincinnati on a doubles wild card awarded in early August, with Venus also taking a singles wild card that ended in a first-round loss to Emiliana Arango. They had intended to play together at Wimbledon in July, an entry that collapsed when Serena hurt her knee during her singles loss to Maya Joint and withdrew from the doubles draw before it began.
Serena is 44 and roughly ten weeks into a return that began at Queen’s Club in June after nearly four years away. Venus has taken a narrower path through 2026, entering selectively and building most of her competitive work around doubles partnerships rather than singles. Neither has framed this summer as a results project, which is part of what made the tiebreak comeback interesting. Nobody in that stadium expected the scoreline to reach a point where a double fault mattered.
What Monday did not settle is the only question that follows the sisters to New York. The US Open main draw begins Aug. 30, and whether Serena and Venus appear in the women’s doubles draw together remains unresolved. No entry has been announced and neither sister has committed publicly. Venus is separately entered in the tournament’s revamped mixed doubles championship, which is played during Fan Week and is a different competition with a different entry mechanism.
The route, if there is one, runs through the USTA. Neither sister holds a doubles ranking that would carry a team into the draw on merit, which leaves a wild card as the mechanism, and the US Open has historically been willing to spend one on them. It did in 2022, when the sisters were given a doubles wild card for what was then framed as Serena’s farewell. The tournament has not said whether it intends to do so again, and the wild card allocation is still being finalized.
What Cincinnati established is narrower but not nothing. Serena’s knee held up through a match that went the distance. The pair found a level in the second set that a Wimbledon withdrawal and four years apart made no promises about. And the result, unlike the singles evidence either sister has assembled this season, was decided by two points rather than by a gap. Whether that is enough to produce one more entry at Flushing Meadows is a decision that belongs to the sisters and the tournament, and both have been in no hurry to make it.
