Serena Williams Is Coming Back As A Wild Card At Wimbledon

After a few months of cheeky silence and misdirection, plus an experiment on the doubles court, Serena Williams is completing her comeback to professional tennis. The 44-year-old has accepted a wild card into the singles main draw at Wimbledon, which begins next week, causing the traditionally stodgy tournament to post heatedly about the occasion.

Williams retired from competition after a third-round appearance at the 2022 U.S. Open. Her first-round match at Wimbledon will mark her first professional singles match since that day. She won the grass-court major seven times, most recently in 2016. In her last appearance in 2022, she lost in the first round.

When Williams reentered the anti-doping testing pool at the end of 2025, I thought we were about to witness an extremely effortful marketing campaign for the telehealth company her husband Alexis Ohanian invests in, and the GLP-1 drugs it prescribes. Since her original retirement, she has appeared regularly in ads for the company, and credited the drugs with losing 34 pounds before her return to competition.