Serena Williams is back. Can the 44-year-old win one more major?
Williams joins a growing list of star athletes who have tried to return to competitive play in their 40s after retiring or stepping away.
After months of speculation, Serena Williams is poised to return to the world of professional tennis. The 23-time Grand Slam champion accepted a doubles wild card into the Queen’s Club tournament set to take place next week in London.
The 44-year old Williams hung up her racquet in 2022 after her third round loss at the U.S. Open. But at the end of 2025, she applied to rejoin the International Tennis Integrity Agency’s drug-testing program, negative results from which are a requirement for players seeking to return to competition.
Williams now joins a list of legendary athletes who have returned to competitive play in their 40s after stepping away from their respective sports. Examples include quarterback Tom Brady, who, at age 45, reversed his retirement and played another season; golfer Tiger Woods, then 43 years old, who returned to tournament play after a series of career-threatening injuries to win that year’s Masters; and tennis legend Martina Navratilova, who retired from singles competition play in the early 1990s, then returned at age 49 to the doubles circuit where she won a Grand Slam and other titles.
“Williams’ return to tennis at age 44 seems to transcend the recent phenomenon of aging athletes reentering the competitive spotlight for a number of reasons, not the least of which is her standing as perhaps the greatest women’s tennis player of all time,” said Dan Lebowitz, the executive director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society.
For Lebowitz, Serena’s return “feels much more akin to Brady’s last age-defying hurrah” than a “good-bye tour,” which in tennis typically sees a player compete in select events during what observers consider the waning days of a career. Players are typically well past their prime and unable to post results commensurate with their peak years during such tours, but they allow fans to bid the player farewell.
But could Williams — now a mother of two, who’s been absent from competition for four years — add to her Grand Slam tally?
Some observers think that a return to competitive form for someone as talented as Williams may not be inconceivable, if still very challenging. Rick Macci, who formerly coached Williams, told CBS News that he expects her to seek entry into singles competition at Wimbledon, which is slated to begin on June 29, and the U.S. Open in late August.
“Serena can still pop a serve [at] 120 (mph). Most of all, she can carve the Compton can opener like the sport has never seen. You will see it again soon,” Macci said on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, in regard to her slice serve.
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Patrick Mouratoglou, who also coached Williams from from 2012 to 2022, told Eurosport France that “one person capable of achieving the impossible, it’s her.”
Williams may still have the talent, but what about her physicality?
The sporting world is by now well-acquainted with athletes playing on well into middle age, said Alan Klein, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Northeastern University, who has studied athletic development and sports culture for nearly 50 years.
And although Williams has said little publicly about what’s motivating her comeback, which she appeared to confirm in a promotional video posted on Instagram, the incentives for athletes to prolong their careers have shifted in tandem with advancements in the science of fitness, training and medicine, according to Klein.
Sports science radically transformed in the 1980s and 1990s with the introduction of more rigorous training programs backed by science, specialized strength and conditioning regimens, and new approaches to nutrition and recovery, Klein said. Those and other changes have helped reshape expectations about athletic longevity for many of today’s athletes, he said.
“The difference in the past is that they didn’t have the sophisticated training, resources and nutrition that today’s athletes have access to, and that can go a long way toward fueling the desire to compete” late in their careers, Klein said.
Williams has also become something of a poster child for GLP-1 weight loss drugs in recent years, appearing in commercials for Zepbound, a once-weekly injectable GLP-1, and publicly endorsing the product and access to it through Ro, a New York-based telehealth company, in which her husband, Alexis Ohanian, was an early investor. She claims to have lost 34 pounds in 2025 while on the drug, according to health metrics she shared through Ro.
Trimming down, as she appeared to do, would only help her chances of returning to form, said Klein. As she has historically relied on her power and shotmaking, Williams may be better positioned than other aging players with less developed or prominent racquet skills.
Regardless of what may be driving her return, Lebowitz suggested that Williams’ appearance at Queens next week could set the stage for “one more historic run” at the All England Club, where she previously won seven times in singles and six times in doubles.
According to the Queen’s Club, Williams is supposedly making her return with the Canadian rising star Victoria Mboko, who is the top ranked Canadian singles player across both men’s and women’s competitors. “It is also fitting that in her return, Serena, herself the modern day exemplar of women’s power and empowerment in sport, is pairing with [a] 19 year-old prodigy,” he added. “Mboko, like so many other women on the tour, credit Williams as the paramount inspiration for their tennis journeys.”
