Serena Williams and Venus Williams will play Wimbledon doubles as wild card entry

Serena Williams will play Wimbledon for the first time in four years, reuniting with her sister, Venus, in the women’s doubles event.

Serena, 44, and Venus, 45, have won the Wimbledon title six times as a pair, plus the singles title 12 times between them — Serena seven and Venus five. Two of those doubles titles, in 2000 and 2002, came after they had entered the tournament through the wild card system.

Their reunion comes as Serena returns to tennis after nearly four years away, with Venus having returned from a hiatus of her own at last year’s D.C. Open in Washington, D.C.

Serena is not playing singles at Wimbledon. During a news conference at Queen’s, her first event back, she said: “I want to play singles and we’ll see if I get there and if not, that’s not my journey right now.”

Were the Williams sisters to win the title, they would smash the world record for the oldest combined age of a Grand Slam-winning team. Hsieh Su-wei (Taiwan) and Barbora Strýcová had a combined age of 74 years and 303 days when they won Wimbledon 2023.

While the other three Grand Slams — the Australian, French and U.S. Opens — ordinarily limit their wild cards to players from those countries, aside from rare exceptions for former champions and a reciprocal system between the Australian and French tennis federations, Wimbledon’s approach has historically been more outward-looking. Last year was an exception: Two-time champion Petra Kvitová of the Czech Republic was the only player not representing the U.K. to receive a main-draw wild card.

This is a developing story and will be updated.