Serena Williams ended her retirement on June 1 and will play doubles at the HSBC Championship on June 8 in London—her first competition since stepping away in 2022. Her return echoes past recoveries and returns in women’s sports, from Lindsey Vonn’s post-surge
Serena Williams didn’t just step back onto a tennis court on paper—she chose a specific date, a specific event, and a specific moment: the HSBC Championship in London on June 8.
On June 1, Williams announced she was ending her retirement and would return to play doubles, nearly four years after she last competed. She stepped away from the sport in 2022, and this will be her first competition since then.
Williams’ comeback story has never been one single return. It has been repeated, and at times, it has come with medical and personal setbacks that could have ended careers.
She won the 2017 Australian Open while pregnant, then gave birth to her daughter Olympia later that year. In the same stretch, she also dealt with complications from a pulmonary embolism. Despite that, she returned to the court in December 2017. She made the Wimbledon finals in 2018 and 2019, building momentum again after what she had already survived.
Now she’s preparing for another return at age 44. She is a mother of two, with her second daughter, Adira, born in 2023.
The sequence—retirement. a return announced for a defined tournament. and a career marked by recovery after major disruptions—lands in a broader pattern across women’s sports. Williams’ situation isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s arriving alongside other athletes who have fought their way back, sometimes under conditions that felt impossible.
Lindsey Vonn. for example. came out of retirement at 41 after partial knee replacement surgery to compete in the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympic Games. The alpine skier tore her left ACL while training for the Games and still competed. but suffered a horrific crash that required her to be airlifted off the mountain. She remained hospitalized for weeks after the crash. Even with that history behind her. Vonn said her age and ACL injury had no bearing on the crash as she continued to consider racing again.
Brittney Griner’s road back has been shaped by confinement and diplomacy. In 2022. the WNBA star was detained for almost 10 months in a Russian prison after Russian customs officials found cannabis vape cartridges in her luggage while she was playing there during the WNBA offseason. After the U.S. government negotiated her release in a prisoner swap, she returned to the court for the 2023 WNBA season. She was named an All-Star and also Comeback Player of the Year. In 2024, she delivered another All-Star season and helped Team USA win Olympic gold in Paris.
In gymnastics. Simone Biles took a two-year hiatus to focus on her mental health after battling “the twisties. ” which forced her to withdraw from the Tokyo Olympics. She returned in the Paris Games and looked every bit dominant—winning three gold medals and a silver medal. In doing so. she officially became the most decorated gymnast in history with 41 combined World and Olympic medals. and she also became an outspoken advocate for athlete health.
Dara Torres has been on a different kind of comeback rhythm, returning more than once. She swam in three consecutive Olympics—1984, 1988, and 1992—before taking a seven-year hiatus. She came back to win five medals at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. After another break, she returned again at 41 for the 2008 Beijing Games, capturing three more medals.
Even track and field has carried its own return stories. Allyson Felix—described in the source as the most decorated track and field star in American history—announced in April that she is coming out of retirement to pursue a comeback for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Felix retired in 2022 with 11 Olympic medals across five Games. including a bronze medal in the 400 meter in Tokyo two years after she gave birth to her first child in 2018. She had her second child in 2024 and is now attempting to qualify for her sixth Olympics. She will be 42 in 2028.
Williams’ return to tennis now adds another chapter to this shared landscape: athletes choosing a comeback not as a headline, but as a schedule. For Williams, that schedule is clear—June 8 in London—after a decision made June 1 to leave retirement behind and step into doubles competition once again.
Serena Williams return HSBC Championship Serena Williams doubles London women’s sports comebacks Lindsey Vonn comeback Brittney Griner return Simone Biles comeback Dara Torres return Allyson Felix comeback WNBA Olympics