accepted a wildcard<\/a> for the tournament, had not competed since the Miami Open in March 2024 – and last won at the Cincinnati Open in August 2023.<\/p>\nWilliams and fellow American Hailey Baptiste beat Eugenie Bouchard and Clervie Ngounoue 6-3 6-1. <\/p>\n
“It was inspiring to be out here,” Williams told Sky Sports. “I love this game and still hitting it big.”<\/p>\n
She will face another American, Peyton Stearns, in the first round of the singles competition on Tuesday. <\/p>\n
Williams, who was playing doubles for the first time in three years, joked she wished she could have partnered with 23-year-old Baptiste, the world number 50, instead of her sister Serena – the 23-time major champion. <\/p>\n
She said: “I think from the first point I could see that we were going to be a good team. We just should have started playing earlier, years ago, right? I think Serena was just in the way.” <\/p>\n
Venus, who does not have a ranking, won 14 major titles alongside Serena in the women’s doubles, as the Williams sisters dominated the sport for many years. <\/p>\n
Elsewhere, British number three Emma Raducanu and Kazakhstan’s Elena Rybakina beat number four seeds Tereza Mihalikova and Olivia Nicholls 2-6 7-6 (7-4) 11-9. <\/p>\n
The pair lost the first five games of the first set, having been broken three times.<\/p>\n
But they regrouped, taking the second set on a tie-break.<\/p>\n
The British-Kazakh duo then squandered four match points in the championship tie-break, allowing their 9-5 lead to slip.<\/p>\n
But they won the next two points from there to seal victory on their debut playing together. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Seven-time Grand Slam winner Venus Williams has celebrated victory in the last 16 of the women’s doubles at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":281314,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4105],"tags":[79,1068,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-282181","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114896260675237620","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}