Williams Sisters Face Heartbreaking Loss in US Open Doubles

On a late-summer night in New York, the marquee names weren’t on the singles schedule. They were sharing the same side of the net again.

Serena and Venus Williams walked back into Arthur Ashe Stadium as a doubles team, and the US Open bent its usual rules to make room. First‑round doubles almost never touches the night session. This one did. It had to.

From the defending men’s champion down, everyone wanted a seat.

“I think there is no better plan than to watch the doubles, the Williamses once again, while getting a treatment,” Carlos Alcaraz said after cruising through his own match. “I’m going to be ready for that.”

He picked the right show. The sisters turned what could have been a gentle nostalgia tour into a full‑blooded fight, only to see it slip away in cruel fashion.

A comeback, then a collapse

Facing Hao-Ching Chan and Maya Joint, Serena and Venus lost the first set 6-3, then dug in. They clawed back from 4-1 down in the third set, the old competitive fire unmistakable, the crowd sensing one more famous escape.

They forced a 10-point match tiebreak. Then they surged. 5-0 up.

Arthur Ashe roared. For a moment, it felt like time had folded in on itself, like the stadium had been dropped back into 1999 or 2009, when the Williams sisters owned this court and this tournament, when they were not just stars but a force that bent the sport around them.

Then it all unraveled.

Chan and Joint refused to go away, and the errors crept in. The sisters, so sharp through the late stages of the third set and the opening points of the breaker, double‑faulted at key moments. The lead vanished. The match went with it.

The final scoreline — 6-3, 6-7 (6), 7-6 (10-7) to Chan and Joint — reads like a thriller. In the stands, it felt like a gut punch.

The US Tennis Association said the sisters would not be available for comment. Their body language at the net said enough.

Legends out of time

This was their first US Open appearance since 2022, at the Grand Slam they’ve won twice together and turned into a second home. They came in at 44 and 46 years old, Serena back from retirement and a long layoff, Venus still grinding on tour.

Age. Rust. Nerves. Take your pick. Whatever the cause, the tiebreak exposed what the previous hour had hidden: closing at this level, at this age, against hungry opposition, is a different sport.

Their record here as a team now stands at 27-8 over 10 appearances, with titles in 1999 and 2009. For years they were the standard in women’s doubles, stacking up 14 Grand Slam titles and Olympic gold medals in 2000, 2008 and 2012, even sharing the No. 1 ranking for eight weeks.

It once looked like their first‑round loss in 2022 was the final chapter. Serena stepped away from tennis that year with 23 Grand Slam singles titles and a career that had already stretched beyond any reasonable script.

She came back this summer. The results have been harsh.

Serena has now lost to Maya Joint twice in a matter of months, falling to the Australian in three sets at Wimbledon in her singles return, then withdrawing from doubles there with Venus after injuring her knee. That setback pushed their Grand Slam reunion back to New York.

Here, it ended in another match tiebreak defeat, echoing their loss in Cincinnati. Venus, too, has taken her lumps; she went out in the first round of singles.

The names are the same. The stakes feel the same. The margins no longer are.

New champions, same stage

The night wasn’t only about the past. It never is in New York.

While Serena and Venus wrestled with the line between memory and reality, Carlos Alcaraz and Aryna Sabalenka went about the business of defending their turf.

Alcaraz, back at the US Open after four months out with a right wrist injury, looked sharp again in a 6-3, 6-4, 6-1 win over Wu Yibing to reach the round of 16. The two‑time champion will next face No. 20 seed Tommy Paul, who outlasted No. 15 Alexander Bublik in five sets.

“To be honest I’m better than I thought,” Alcaraz admitted. The draw will soon test that confidence.

Sabalenka, chasing history of her own, finally had to dig. The No. 1 seed beat Kamilla Rakhimova 6-3, 6-4, but the second set stretched to 54 minutes — one minute longer than her entire previous match. She dealt with resistance from across the net and an unwelcome distraction in the stands, noting the smell of marijuana during the contest.

She is trying to become the first player to win three straight US Open titles since Serena Williams from 2012 to 2014. Taylor Townsend awaits her in the round of 16.

So the torch doesn’t pass in a single night. It never does. It flickers between eras, sometimes within the same session, as one generation fights to hold on and another takes aim at records they grew up watching.

On Friday, Serena and Venus Williams walked off Arthur Ashe with another heartbreaking loss and no words offered. The scoreboard said first round. The atmosphere said something else entirely.