Serena Williams is in discussions about a possible return to competitive tennis at Queen’s Club next month.
Four years after she waved goodbye to the sport in New York, Williams is considering playing doubles at the WTA 500 event in London in two weeks’ time.
Nothing has yet been finalised.
Queen’s Opportunity
The American great would need a wildcard to participate, but there are two available for the grass court event which begins on Monday, 8 June.
There are two doubles wildcards available for the tournament at Queen’s, and one is reserved for a team which includes a former world number one, a Grand Slam champion of the past 10 years or a current top-30 player.
Wimbledon – where Williams has won seven singles and seven doubles titles – begins three weeks later.
The Served podcast claimed Williams would play with 19-year-old Canadian Victoria Mboko at Queen’s.
BBC Sport has not yet been able to confirm this.
A Champion’s Credentials
Williams is one of the greatest players of all time.
Her 23 Grand Slam singles titles are the most by a woman in the Open era and second-highest of all-time behind Margaret Court.
- 23 Grand Slam singles titles
- 14 major women’s doubles titles with sister Venus
- Three Olympic golds in women’s doubles with Venus
She also won 14 major women’s doubles titles with sister Venus.
The pair won three Olympic golds in the discipline.
Venus is still playing on the WTA Tour.
Evolving Away From Tennis
Williams has never liked the word retirement, preferring instead to say she was “evolving away” from tennis in 2022.
She lost to Australia’s Ajla Tomljanovic in the third round of the 2022 US Open, in what the world thought would be her final match.
Williams had reached the semi-finals of the Australian Open earlier that year, and won her last Grand Slam singles title in Melbourne in 2017 at the age of 35.
Weight Loss Journey
Her potential return comes amid months of speculation and several interviews about her weight loss.
Last year, Williams told the Today Show in the US about losing 31lb (14kg) over the previous eight months.
She said had to look at her extra weight as “an opponent”.
Despite “training five hours a day” and “running, walking, biking, stair climbing,” she told the show she had no other choice but to “try something different”.
Williams would not say which weight loss drug she was taking, although she had just become a spokesperson for Ro, a company which sells GLP-1 brands like Wegovy and Zepbound (known as Mounjaro in the UK) through its weight-loss programme. Her husband, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, is also an investor.
Williams said she was now seeing the benefit of her hard work at the gym, was training for a half-marathon and “running farther than I ever had”.
In a follow-up interview on the Today Show in January she said she was “going
Williams has been free to return to the sport since 22 February, having completed six months back in the drug testing pool.