{"id":550456,"date":"2026-04-25T19:17:16","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T19:17:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/550456\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T19:17:16","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T19:17:16","slug":"madrid-open-katie-boulter-teams-up-with-absolute-icon-venus-williams-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/550456\/","title":{"rendered":"Madrid Open: Katie Boulter teams up with ‘absolute icon’ Venus Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"

Briton Katie Boulter said it was a privilege to play alongside “absolute icon” Venus Williams as they reached round two of the women’s doubles at the Madrid Open.<\/p>\n

Boulter, who was knocked out of the singles draw on Friday<\/a>, and Williams, 45, had never played together before, but defeated China’s Jiang Xinyu and Xu Yifan 4-6 6-3 10-7.<\/p>\n

They will take on Taiwan’s Hsieh Su-wei and American Sofia Kenin in round two.<\/p>\n

Seven-time Grand Slam champion Williams is on an 11-match losing streak in singles and her last doubles win was at the US Open in September.<\/p>\n

“It was nice to play and it was meant to be,” American Williams said.<\/p>\n

“She has great energy – I don’t even know if Serena [Williams] has this energy.”<\/p>\n

Boulter only approached Williams about playing earlier this week and admitted to feeling nervous before stepping on to the court.<\/p>\n

“Everyone came out here for an absolute icon,” Boulter said.<\/p>\n

“I had nerves coming in this morning but you [Venus] calmed me down in the warm-up. We just enjoyed it. We had the mindset of going out with a smile on our face. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Briton Katie Boulter said it was a privilege to play alongside “absolute icon” Venus Williams as they reached…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":550406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-550456","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550456\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/550406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}