Serena Williams and Venus Williams will play Wimbledon doubles as wild card entry

Serena Williams will play Wimbledon for the first time in four years, reuniting with her sister, Venus, in the women’s doubles event.

Serena, 44, and Venus, 45, have won the Wimbledon title six times as a pair, plus the singles title 12 times between them — Serena seven and Venus five. Two of those doubles titles, in 2000 and 2002, came after they had entered the tournament through the wild card system. On both occasions, Serena was seeded, but Venus received a wild card to complete the pairing. They won their last one in 2016, when Serena also won the singles title.

Their reunion comes as Serena returns to tennis after nearly four years away, with Venus having returned from a hiatus of her own at last year’s D.C. Open in Washington, D.C.

Serena is not slated to play singles at Wimbledon, and nor is Venus, but one women’s singles wild card remains unallocated. During a news conference at Queen’s, Serena’s first event back, she said: “I want to play singles and we’ll see if I get there, and if not, that’s not my journey right now.”

Were the Williams sisters to win the title, they would smash the world record for the oldest combined age of a Grand Slam-winning team. Hsieh Su-wei (Taiwan) and Barbora Strýcová had a combined age of 74 years and 303 days when they won Wimbledon 2023.

While the other three Grand Slams — the Australian, French and U.S. Opens — ordinarily limit their wild cards to players from those countries, aside from rare exceptions for former champions and a reciprocal system between the Australian and French tennis federations, Wimbledon’s approach has historically been more outward-looking. Last year was an exception: Two-time champion Petra Kvitová of the Czech Republic was the only player not representing the U.K. to receive a main-draw wild card.

This year, singles wild cards have been allocated to Bulgaria’s Grigor Dimitrov, the 2014 semifinalist, and to Maja Chwalińska, the 24-year-old from Poland who reached this month’s French Open final after coming through qualifying. Dimitrov, 35 and now the world No. 170, led world No. 1 Jannik Sinner by two sets to love at last year’s tournament before being forced to retire with a serious injury to his right pectoral muscle.

Chwalińska, who is now world No. 21, would have had to qualify without the wild card, because her ranking was too low for automatic entry when the entry lists were released.

Three-time Grand Slam champion Stan Wawrinka, who is playing his final season on tour at 41, has also received a singles wild card, while Nick Kyrgios, the 2022 finalist, and Kazakhstan’s Alexander Bublik have received a men’s doubles wild card. There was no singles wild card for Australia’s Kyrgios, 31, who has played the past four years sparingly due to recurrent injuries.

Dan Evans, the British favorite who is retiring after Wimbledon, did not receive a singles wild card, but two men’s singles wild cards are still to be announced, along with two men’s doubles wild cards. Evans, 36, who played doubles with Andy Murray at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, has received a doubles wild card with Britain’s Henry Searle, who he is coaching on an informal basis.

Serena Williams’ comeback continues this week at the Berlin Open, where she is playing doubles with Czech world No. 10 in singles Karolína Muchová. Wimbledon starts June 29.

Wimbledon wild cards 2026

Women’s singles

Maja Chwalińska 🇵🇱

Harriet Dart 🇬🇧

Alicia Dudeney 🇬🇧

Hannah Klugman 🇬🇧

Mika Stojsavljevic 🇬🇧

Katie Swan 🇬🇧

Mimi Xu 🇬🇧

TBA

Men’s singles

Grigor Dimitrov 🇧🇬

Stan Wawrinka 🇨🇭

Arthur Fery 🇬🇧

Jacob Fearnley 🇬🇧

Jack Pinnington Jones 🇬🇧

Toby Samuel 🇬🇧

TBA

TBA

Women’s doubles

Serena Williams / Venus Williams 🇺🇸

Katie Boulter / Heather Watson 🇬🇧

Madeleine Brooks / Amelia Rajecki 🇬🇧

Jodie Burrage / Mika Stojsavljevic 🇬🇧

Freya Christie / Eden Silva 🇬🇧

Harriet Dart / Maia Lumsden 🇬🇧

Alicia Dudeney / Mimi Xu 🇬🇧

Men’s doubles

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