Maya Joint Defeats Williams Sisters in Arthur Ashe Doubles Thriller

Under the lights of Arthur Ashe Stadium, in a slot usually reserved for the sport’s biggest singles stars, Serena and Venus Williams walked back onto the Grand Slam doubles stage. The return was meant to be celebratory, a late-summer encore in New York where they have twice lifted the US Open women’s doubles trophy.

Instead, it became another chapter in the rise of Maya Joint as the unlikely spoiler of a legend’s farewell tour.

The Australian, partnering Hao-Ching Chan, produced a remarkable comeback to beat the Williams sisters 6-3, 6-7 (6-8), 7-6 (10-7), clawing back from 0-5 down in the deciding match tiebreak in front of a packed, partisan crowd.

From Wimbledon to New York, Same Heartbreak

Joint’s name is becoming uncomfortably familiar in the Williams orbit. At Wimbledon, she sent Serena out of the ladies’ singles in the first round on Centre Court. Now, in New York, she has done it again, this time striking at the sisters’ shared legacy in doubles.

The match carried a sense of occasion from the moment it was scheduled. First-round doubles almost never touches the night session at Arthur Ashe. The Williams name changed that. This was billed as a reunion, a nostalgic throwback to the days when Serena and Venus ruled the doubles court as ruthlessly as they did singles.

For a while, it looked like the script might hold.

A Wild Momentum Swing

Joint and Chan started sharper, taking the opening set 6-3 and threatening to run away with the match when they surged to a 4-1 lead in the third. Their returns bit, their angles stretched the court, and the sisters, rusty from their long absence as a team, struggled to find rhythm.

Then the old fire kicked in.

Serena and Venus wrestled their way back into the deciding set, feeding off the noise and emotion in the stands. They had already saved the match once, snatching the second set in a tense tiebreak 7-6 (8-6), and as they dragged the contest into a match tiebreak, the atmosphere turned from curiosity to belief.

The comeback felt inevitable when they stormed to a 5-0 lead in the race to 10. They were roaring between points, fists clenched, the stadium on its feet. It looked, for a few minutes, like the Williams sisters were about to pull off a vintage escape.

Then the pressure flipped.

From 0-5 to Glory

Joint and Chan refused to fold. They tightened their patterns, targeted the middle, and forced the issue on return. The Williams sisters, so often the ones applying the squeeze, suddenly felt it instead.

Both Serena and Venus double-faulted in the home stretch. The errors cracked the door open, and Joint and Chan charged straight through, winning 10 of the last 12 points to steal the tiebreak 10-7 and with it a match that had seemed gone.

The crowd, desperate for one more deep run from the sisters, fell into a stunned hush. Joint, for the second straight major, had walked into a grand stage built around Serena Williams and walked out with the win.

A Legacy Revisited

This was supposed to be the continuation of a reunion that never quite started at Wimbledon. The sisters had planned their Grand Slam doubles return there, only for Serena’s knee injury to force a withdrawal. That delay pushed their comeback to New York, a city where their record together is formidable: titles in 1999 and 2009, and now a 27-8 mark from 10 doubles appearances at the US Open.

Their broader doubles résumé is almost unmatched. Fourteen Grand Slam women’s doubles titles. Olympic gold medals in 2000, 2008 and 2012. A shared run at No. 1 in the doubles rankings. For more than a decade, they turned major doubles draws into extensions of their dominance.

The last time they played a Slam together, in 2022, they lost in the first round. It felt then like a farewell. Serena stepped away from the sport after collecting 23 Grand Slam singles titles, and the assumption was that the Williams doubles era had closed with that early defeat.

Her return this summer reopened the door. Instead of a triumphant coda, though, the reunion has brought only razor-thin heartbreak: a match tiebreak loss in Cincinnati, and now another in New York.

Venus’ Struggles Continue

For Venus, the pain of the night ran deeper. She had already exited the singles draw in the first round, and the doubles loss with Serena capped a brutal visit to Flushing Meadows. Once the standard-bearer for American women’s tennis, she now finds herself fighting just to stay competitive in the early rounds.

Yet the fact remains: even in defeat, even in their forties, Serena and Venus still command the biggest court at the US Open for a first-round doubles match. Still they draw a packed house. Still they create a stage large enough that a player like Maya Joint can redefine her own career with one fearless performance.

Joint has now twice turned that stage into her own. If this really is the last stand of the Williams sisters as a Grand Slam doubles team, the sport may remember not just the titles and the gold medals, but the night under the Arthur Ashe lights when an Australian upstart refused to let their story end on her terms instead of theirs.