After a fall, Venus Williams is eliminated on the first day of Wimbledon

She walked onto the court late one gray and chilly afternoon with that rocking gait tennis fans have become so familiar with over the past 25 years. With her tennis bag on her shoulder, she pulled on the ends of an elastic band to do some last-minute upper-body stretches.

Venus Williams, five-time Wimbledon singles champion and nine-time finalist, was back on Center Court on Monday aged 43, competing to become one of the oldest women to win a singles main-draw at the oldest Grand Slam event in history. the sport. .

That’s not how the day went. It eventually left her with a limp, an injured symbol of some undeniable truths about this era of tennis.

The first: Players are stretching their careers longer than ever before, into their late 30s and, in the case of the Williams sisters, early 40s, thanks to better training, nutrition and compensation. Caroline Wozniacki, 32, a former world No. 1, announced last month that she was returning to tennis after retiring in 2020 and giving birth to two children.

The second: It’s hard to stay sane and win in this brutal sport in your late thirties and early forties unless your name is Novak Djokovic.

There were members of the older set scattered around the All England Club on Monday, the first day of Wimbledon, and not just in the television booths. Williams took Center Court after the 36-year-old Djokovic began another title defense in his usual fashion by defeating Argentina’s Pedro Cachín in straight sets. American player John Isner, 38, lost in four sets on court 16 to Spain’s Jaume Munar, but two lanes away, on court 18, Stan Wawrinka, another 38-year-old, gave a clinic to Emil Ruusuvuori, taking the 24 year-old Finn in straight sets.

Williams came up short in her effort, a bad luck, 6-4, 6-3 loss to Ukraine’s Elina Svitolina in which Williams aggravated an injured right knee early in the match. Williams never regained the form she showed in the first few minutes of the game, as she took an early lead and gave every sign that a win for the old guard was on the horizon. Last month, Williams, ranked 558th in the world, defeated a player in the top 50 for the first time in four years, beating Italy’s Camila Giorgi in a third-set tiebreak in Birmingham, England.

The win helped Williams enter the Wimbledon tournament with a wild card, which she won in five of nine appearances between 2000 and 2008. to a certain end.

“I’m a competitor,” said a glum and shocked Williams at her post-game press conference. “That’s what I do for a living.”

She’s been doing it since she was 14.

Williams played on grass that was slick from a mid-afternoon rain shower and the moisture that lingered in the air all day. She broke Svitolina’s serve in the second game. But facing the breaking point in the third game, Williams charged at the net and then fell to the grass with a scream as she grabbed her right knee, which was wrapped in a brace.

Williams lay on the floor for several minutes while Svitolina placed a towel under her head for support. It looked like Williams’ afternoon would end there. But she got up and stumbled to her seat, where a trainer examined her. After that, her movement was much more limited than in the first two games.

Stumbling through points, she struggled to extract the power from her groundstrokes and her serve that has long been the hallmark of her game, but requires the ability to push and pivot with the lower half of her body. The speed of her first serve dropped from 115 miles per hour at the start of the competition to the mid-1990s.

“I was literally killing it — then the grass killed me,” Williams said. “It’s not fun now.”

There was something eerily familiar about the sequence of events. Two years ago, her sister Serena walked onto the same field for her first-round match, seeking her eighth Wimbledon title at the age of 39. The effort lasted just six games: Serena Williams was forced to withdraw in the first round due to an ankle injury.

Serena Williams returned to Wimbledon last year at the start of what appears to have been one last summer of professional tennis, although you never know these days. She lost in the first round in three sets in what felt like a farewell night.

What was striking about her older sister’s game on Monday was how little it felt like a farewell speech, and how defiant Venus Williams seemed as she faced the toll aging takes on any athlete, regardless of her ability.

She said she was in shock from her injury, even though older athletes are much more prone to injury.

“I just can’t believe this happened,” she said. “It’s, like, bizarre.”

She was upset about how the match had ended. On match point, Svitolina hit a ball that was called out, but the chair umpire gave her the game when the Hawk-Eye system showed the shot was in. Williams’ return of the shot was wide and the referee ruled the point would not be replayed. Williams skipped the post-match handshake with the referee.

She said the injury had been so painful that she couldn’t concentrate. She said she never considered quitting and would have her knee checked on Tuesday. Moments later, she talked about the difficulty of coping with another injury after recovering from a hamstring injury at the start of the year.

She’s been missing from the tour for a while. It’s not what she wants for herself in her early forties.

“Hopefully I can figure out what’s going on with me and move on,” she said.

For almost 30 years, that has meant one thing: back to the tennis court.