Venus Williams: the score that sport still hasn’t settled with her

Venus Williams

Photo: Tatiana from Moscow, Russia / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 17, 1980 Lynwood
Occupation	Tennis Player
Awards	Best Female Tennis Player ESPY Award · Best Female Athlete ESPY Award · NAACP Image Award – President's Award

She is still showing up. This is, depending on who is counting, either the most extraordinary footnote in professional sport or the most straightforward statement about what drives her — Venus Williams, accepting another wildcard into another Grand Slam, competing in a professional era that began before her current opponents were born. The question her career keeps putting back on the table is not whether she can win at this stage. It is whether the account of what she built was ever written accurately in the first place.

Richard Williams arrived at the idea before Venus did. A self-taught tennis observer in Compton, California, he wrote an 85-page plan projecting that two daughters, trained from childhood on public courts in one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods, could become the best players in the world. Venus Ebony Starr Williams, born June 17, 1980 in Lynwood, was three years old when the family relocated to Compton. She started competing locally before she was ten. By fourteen she was a professional.

The path was always visible but it ran through friction. Compton’s courts were not the academies of Florida or Europe; the coaching philosophy was Richard Williams’s own invention, and the tennis establishment was not persuaded. When Venus reached the 1997 US Open final at seventeen — losing to Martina Hingis — the general narrative reached for the idea of precocity and moved on. What the moment actually represented was a player who had gotten there on unconventional terms and would continue to dictate her own.

The years from 2000 through 2008 established what Venus Williams could do at the peak of her physical powers. She won Wimbledon five times in that span — in 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007, and 2008 — and the US Open twice, in 2000 and 2001. She collected four Olympic gold medals across Sydney and Beijing, partnering with Serena in doubles combinations that lost precisely zero Grand Slam finals together. Her peak singles ranking, reached in February 2002, was world number one.

The equal pay campaign sits in the middle of that record and belongs there. From 2005 she spent two years arguing, publicly and in writing — including a 2006 letter in The Times of London and direct addresses to the Grand Slam committee — that Wimbledon’s prize money structure was indefensible. In 2007, the tournament conceded. She won the championship that year and became the first woman to collect a champion’s check equal in size to the men’s winner. Within months, the French Open followed. The intervention cost political capital at a moment when her own career results were the strongest argument anyone could have made. She made both arguments simultaneously.

The narrative that took hold after Serena became the dominant Williams — the one that cast Venus as the precedent-setter whose own moment had already passed — never quite accounted for what she continued to do. She reached the Australian Open final in 2017, at thirty-six, thirteen years after her last Grand Slam final before that one. By then she had been managing Sjögren’s syndrome, an autoimmune condition she was diagnosed with in 2011, for six years: a period during which she withdrew from the 2011 US Open, struggled with basic physical movement on some days, and rebuilt her game around a dietary regimen she adopted at her sister’s suggestion. The illness-as-career-end story was the wrong story. What happened instead was a career with a second act inside the first.

In 2026, she is competing at the US Open on a wildcard. It is her twenty-second appearance in the main draw at the event. Earlier in the year she accepted wildcards at the Australian Open — where she became the oldest woman to enter the main draw in the Open Era — and at Indian Wells, the ATX Open, and the Madrid WTA 1000. She is not contending for titles at this stage. She is, in a more precise sense, still on the premises of professional sport at an age when that is itself an answer to the people who said Sjögren’s would finish her career before the 2010s were over.

Off the court, the architecture of her life has been built out as deliberately as the tennis was. Her interior design firm, V Starr Interiors, has operated since 2002 and has worked on projects at commercial scale. She co-founded Palazzo.ai, an AI-assisted interior design platform, and previously ran EleVen, an athletic wear brand she launched in 2007 and paused in 2024 with an implied reopening. She holds an associate degree in interior design and has continued academic study in the field. Since 2023 she has served as an operating partner at Topspin Consumer Partners, a private equity firm focused on consumer brands.

The next confirmed date on her calendar is the US Open. After that, the question of what Venus Williams does next will presumably continue to be answered the way it has been answered for the past three decades: on her own terms, without asking for a consensus first.

Tags: sports, athletes, tennis, US Open, Wimbledon, Serena Williams, Venus Williams, tennis players