Serena and Venus Williams Face Tough Opponent in US Open Doubles

NEW YORK – The Williams sisters are back on the US Open doubles stage, and fate has wasted no time in stirring the pot.

Serena and Venus Williams will face Maya Joint and Hao-Ching Chan in the first round of the women’s doubles, the United States Tennis Association confirmed, handing Serena an immediate reunion with the player who ended her Wimbledon singles run – and helped derail the sisters’ summer.

At Wimbledon, Serena entered the singles draw as a wild card, a 44-year-old icon testing herself again on the sport’s grandest lawns. Her campaign barely had time to breathe. Joint beat her in the opening round, and Serena injured her knee in the process, an issue serious enough that she had to withdraw from doubles with Venus. A planned revival of their partnership vanished in a moment.

Now the draw has circled back. Same opponent. Different city. Different stakes.

The sisters arrive in New York as wild cards in doubles, a status that feels almost surreal given their history. They have lifted the US Open women’s doubles trophy twice, and their presence alone still changes the temperature of a court. Yet their recent record at Flushing Meadows underlines how far they are from their dominant peak.

Their last doubles appearance here came in 2022, when they lost in the first round to Linda Nosková and Lucie Hradecká. That match, hyped as a nostalgic showcase, instead served as a reminder that time and rhythm do not always bend to reputation.

They only recently picked up the partnership again. On August 17 at the Cincinnati Masters, Serena and Venus played their first doubles match together since that 2022 US Open outing. It was dramatic, tense, and loud – everything a Williams doubles match tends to be – but it still ended in a first-round defeat to Marta Kostyuk and Peyton Stearns. The instincts are there. The sharp edges, not quite.

New York will see both sisters for the second time this year. Serena has already made a splash, teaming up with Carlos Alcaraz in mixed doubles and pushing that unlikely pairing all the way to the quarterfinals. Venus, by contrast, endured a brief singles stay, falling in the first round to Sofia Kenin.

So the focus turns to doubles, and to a draw stacked with specialists. Taylor Townsend and Kateřina Siniaková lead the field as the No. 1 seeds, a pairing built for hard-court chaos and long, grinding exchanges. They lost in last year’s final to Gabriela Dabrowski and Erin Routliffe, a defeat that still lingers over this event’s pecking order.

This time, that champion duo has been split. Routliffe returns as the No. 9 seed alongside Aldila Sutjiadi, while Dabrowski climbs near the top of the draw as the No. 2 seed with Luisa Stefani. The doubles field, as ever, is full of landmines.

Into that landscape walk Serena and Venus, unseeded, unpredictable, and impossible to ignore. Their first-round meeting with Joint and Chan is more than a routine opener. It is a test of Serena’s knee, of their timing, of whether a legendary team can still bend a brutal draw to its will.

If there is one thing New York has learned over the years, it is this: when the Williams sisters share the same side of the net, the script rarely stays polite for long.