There are two doubles wildcards available for the tournament at Queen\u2019s, and one is reserved for a team which includes a former world number one, a Grand Slam champion of the past 10 years or a current top-30 player.<\/p>\n
WIlliams has never liked the word retirement, preferring instead to say she was “evolving away” from tennis in 2022.<\/p>\n
She lost to Australia\u2019s Ajla Tomljanovic in the third round of the 2022 US Open, in what the world thought would be her final match.<\/p>\n
Williams had reached the semi-finals of the Australian Open the previous year, and won her last Grand Slam singles title in Melbourne in 2017 at the age of 35.<\/p>\n
Her potential return comes amid months of speculation and several interviews about her weight loss.<\/p>\n
Last year, Williams told the Today Show in the US about losing 31lb (14kg) over the previous eight months.<\/p>\n
She said had to look at her extra weight as “an opponent”. Despite “training five hours a day” and “running, walking, biking, stair climbing,” she told the show she had no other choice but to “try something different”.<\/p>\n
Williams would not say which weight loss drug she was taking, although she had just become a spokesperson for Ro, a company which sells GLP-1 brands like Wegovy and Zepbound (known as Mounjaro in the UK) through its weight-loss programme. Her husband, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, is also an investor.<\/p>\n
Williams said she was now seeing the benefit of her hard work at the gym, was training for a half-marathon and “running farther than I ever had”.<\/p>\n
In a follow-up interview on the Today Show in January she said she was “going to see what happens” over a return.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are two doubles wildcards available for the tournament at Queen\u2019s, and one is reserved for a team…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":670302,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-670301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=670301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670301\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/670302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=670301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=670301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=670301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}