Venus Williams made a triumphant return to singles tennis on Tuesday after a 16-month hiatus, defeating fellow American Peyton Stearns 6-3, 6-4 to reach the second round of the WTA and ATP DC Open.
The 45-year-old winner of seven career Grand Slam singles titles rolled to her 819th career WTA singles victory in 97 minutes at the first US Open hardcourt tuneup event.
"It is not easy to come off after all that time and play the perfect match," she said. "Peyton played so well. I felt like I was trying to slow myself down from going faster and faster and faster."
Williams had not played a WTA singles match since March of last year at Miami and had not won a match in 709 days – since defeating Russian Veronika Kudermetova in the first round at Cincinnati in August 2023.
"I wanted to play a good match and win the match," Williams said. "It's so rewarding to come back after a layoff and injuries."
Williams became the oldest player to compete in a WTA tour-level match since Japan's Kimiko Date at 46 in Tokyo in 2017.
She became the oldest WTA match winner since Martina Navratilova at age 47 at Wimbledon in 2004.
"Thank you so much for the energy," Williams told the crowd. "We were literally living and dying together."
Williams broke for a 4-3 lead in the second set, winning nine of 10 points in one stretch, then held to 5-3 and pushed Stearns in a 12-minute ninth game but missed on four match points before Stearns held.
Williams smashed a service winner on her sixth match point for the triumph, booking a second-round date with Polish fifth seed Magdalena Frech.
'A LOT OF THIS IS FOR YOU GUYS'
"I'm back here because of the encouragement of my team and they wanted me to come on back and play again so a lot of this is for you guys," Williams told spectators.
"You guys don't know how much work goes into this. It's nine to five but you're running the whole time, lifting weights and then you're like dying – and then you repeat it the next day."
Japan's Naomi Osaka, a four-time Grand Slam champion, ousted Yulia Putintseva of Kazakhstan 6-2, 7-5, to book a second-round match against Britain's Emma Raducanu, the 2021 US Open winner who eliminated Ukraine's seventh-seeded Marta Kostyuk 7-6 (7/4), 6-4.
"I'm excited about it," Osaka said. "I've never played her before, so for me, that's something really cool too. Because I've seen her, I guess when she first did well at Wimbledon before she won the US Open, moments like that, and I knew she was a good player."
"I'm looking forward to the match," Raducanu said. "It will be a great test of my own game and myself."