Venus Williams became the second-oldest woman to win a tour-level singles match in professional tennis, delivering some of her familiar big serves and groundstrokes at age 45 while beating Peyton Stearns \u2014 22 years her junior \u2014 by a 6-3, 6-4 score at the DC Open on Tuesday night.<\/p>\n
This was the first singles victory for Williams in nearly two years. The only older woman to win a match was Martina Navratilova at 47 in 2004.<\/p>\n
The former No. 1-ranked Williams had not played singles in an official match since March 2024 in Miami, missing time while having surgery to remove uterine fibroids. She hadn’t won in singles since August 2023 in Cincinnati. Until this week, she was listed by the WTA Tour as “inactive.”<\/p>\n
“It is not easy,” Williams said, “to (come back) after all that time and play the perfect match.”<\/p>\n
But backed by a crowd that clearly was there to see, and support, her at the hard-court tournament in the nation’s capital, Williams showed glimpses of the talent she possesses and the skills she displayed while earning all of her Grand Slam titles: seven in singles, 14 in women\u2019s doubles \u2014 all alongside younger sister Serena \u2014 and two in mixed doubles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Venus Williams became the second-oldest woman to win a tour-level singles match in professional tennis, delivering some of her familiar big serves and groundstrokes at age 45 while beating Peyton Stearns \u2014 22 years her junior \u2014 by a 6-3, 6-4 score at the DC Open on Tuesday night. This was the first singles victory …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51831,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51830"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51832,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51830\/revisions\/51832"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}