Venus Williams is set to become the oldest female player to compete in the Australian Open main draw at the age of 45.<\/b><\/p>\n
The seven-time Grand Slam champion has received the final women’s wildcard for the tournament, which begins on 18 January.<\/p>\n
Williams last appeared at Melbourne Park in 2021 when she was beaten by Italy’s Sara Errani in the second round. <\/p>\n
“I’m grateful for the opportunity to return to a place that has meant so much to my career,” she said.<\/p>\n
The American, twice a runner-up in the first Grand Slam event of the year, will surpass the record of Japan’s Kimiko Date, who was 44 when she played at the event in 2015. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Venus Williams is set to become the oldest female player to compete in the Australian Open main draw…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":486849,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[62,1464,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-486848","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-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115824965905082639","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486848\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/486849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}