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London: After slipping to 1204 in the WTA rankings and not playing a competitive singles match in 12 months, tennis legend Serena Williams arrives at Wimbledon, the third Grand Slam, hoping for perhaps the greatest achievement of her career.
The seven-time champion of the English Championship wished herself to end a long wait for her 24th Grand Slam title to equal the record set by Australian Margaret Court.
Rarely have expectations been so high against the American who could become the first unranked woman to win Wimbledon.
Nearly three months before turning 41, Serena has not played a professional singles match since withdrawing from the first round of Wimbledon last year after sustaining an injury during her match against Belarusian Aleksandra Sasnovich.
“I hope I won’t be the last player to win at Wimbledon,” Sasnovich told AFP ahead of last month’s Roland Garros tournament. “She’s a great champion and I want to see her come back.”
Sasnovich’s absence
Sasnovich will miss Wimbledon due to the ban on Russian and Belarus players from participating due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but at least she will see one of her wishes come true for the American champion’s return.
Serena has stood at 23 grand slam titles since winning her seventh Australian Open in 2017 while pregnant.
Since then, she has lost four Grand Slam finals and finished runner-up in the US and Wimbledon in 2018 and 2019, leaving Kurt’s feat yet to be tangible.
Serena will meet in the first round with Frenchwoman Armoni Tan, ranked 113 in the world.
Doubting the return
She returned to competition for the first time on Tuesday, along with Tunisian Anas Jaber, to participate in the women’s doubles in the Eastbourne Preparatory Tournament.
After her first match, she said, “Did I ever doubt that I would come back? Sure, of course. I wouldn’t be honest if I said the opposite and now my body is in good shape.”
“I didn’t retire. I just needed to recover physically and mentally. I don’t have any plans. I just didn’t know when I would come back. I didn’t know how I would come back,” she said at a press conference on Saturday.
Williams is the last player to defend her title at Wimbledon when she achieved it in 2016.
When she played her first match in the English Championship in 1998, that happened three years before the birth of the current world number one, Iga Švientek, who opens her campaign against Croatian Jana Wit.
The 21-year-old arrives at Wimbledon after winning her second major title at Roland Garros, after a first in the French championship also in 2020, and a 35-game unbeaten streak that equaled those of Serena’s sister Venus in 2000, the longest in the third millennium and outperformed Serena’s best series (34).
“To get this streak of 35 wins and beat Serena in this aspect, it’s really special,” said Sviontik.
Wimbledon will test her ability to continue the series, as reaching the fourth round last year was her best in the English championship, knowing that she won the women’s title in 2018.
Šviontik for the first title
In addition to this streak that enabled her to win six titles this season and tweet her out of the fray from the rest of the competitions, the absence of Australian champion Ashleigh Barty after her sudden retirement earlier in the year, which paved the way for the Polish to climb to the top of the rankings, will boost her hopes for a first title in England.
“Grasslands are always careful,” she said. “I honestly like the idea that I don’t have expectations there. It’s kind of comforting.”
Japan’s Naomi Osaka, who has won four majors and is rarely a threat on grass, withdrew due to an Achilles tendon injury.
The Japanese former world number one had previously hinted that she was reluctant to participate in Wimbledon after the WTA decision to suspend the distribution of classification points in the tournament in response to the unwelcome organizers’ decision to prevent Russian and Belarusian players from participating, considering that the matches “without Counting points, it will be an exhibition participation.”
This decision led to the absence of three of the top 20 seeded players: Belarusian Arina Sabalenka, who reached the semi-finals last year, Victoria Azarenka, who reached the same round in 2011 and 2012, and Russia’s Daria Kasatkina.
None of the current top-five women have reached the semi-finals at Wimbledon.
Jaber hopes that she will achieve a better result than reaching the quarter-finals in 2021, especially after the distinguished levels she presents this season after her crowning in the Madrid tournament and her runner-up to Schwentek in Rome, both on the dirt in the thousand sessions, and her achievement of the Berlin tournament title on grass courts last week, which enabled her From advancing to third in the world rankings, the best of her career (revised her score at Eastbourne).