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Venus Williams’s losing streak in singles play has reached 13 matches. <\/p>\n
The seven-time major champion was defeated 6-2, 6-2 by Emiliana Arango on Friday in the first round of the Cincinnati Open. <\/p>\n
The 46-year-old Williams received a wild-card entry to the WTA 1000 event. She has not won a singles match since July 2025. <\/p>\n
Arango, a 25-year-old qualifier from Colombia ranked 95th, needed one hour five minutes to defeat Williams on the grandstand court at Lindner Tennis Center in Mason, Ohio. <\/p>\n
Williams had her serve broken in the first game of the match and faced an uphill battle the rest of the way. Arango was 4 of 5 on converting break points and won 71 per cent of her first-serve points. <\/p>\n
Williams was unable to convert on her lone break opportunity and was only 41% on first-serve points. <\/p>\n
“That kind of eased my nerves a little bit of having maybe a little bit of breathing room. And then I think I just did a good job of staying on it, trying to make her play as much as possible,” Arango said about getting ahead early. <\/p>\n
Arango will face No. 7 seed and defending Cincinnati champion Iga Swiatek in the second round. <\/p>\n
11th appearance in Cincy tourney<\/p>\n
Williams\u2019s last singles victory came last year in Washington, when she defeated Peyton Stearns. <\/p>\n
“I think that at all times I was really controlling the point but unfortunately didn’t finish it the way I wanted to,” said Williams, who is making her 11th appearance in the tournament. <\/p>\n
“The encouraging part is that I’m controlling the shots, but I have to just get a little more consistent on that last part.” <\/p>\n
Williams will remain in Cincinnati to play doubles with her sister, Serena, after they received a wild-card entry. They last played doubles together at the 2022 U.S. Open. <\/p>\n
The Williams sisters were slated to play doubles at Wimbledon before an injury to Serena. They will play Marta Kostyuk and Peyton Stearns in the first round. <\/p>\n
The doubles portion of the tournament starts Sunday. <\/p>\n
“I’m excited and hope that we can both go into it fresh, on our toes and ready. I’ll be preparing for that,” Venus Williams said. <\/p>\n
Venus is also slated to play mixed doubles at the U.S. Open later this month with Alexander Bublik.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 3 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":858367,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-858366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=858366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/858367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=858366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=858366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}