Serena exits Wimbledon doubles as Rybakina becomes the highest seed to fall
A right knee injury has forced Serena Williams out of the Wimbledon doubles she had been scheduled to play with her sister Venus, hours after third-seed Elena Rybakina was dumped out of the singles by Elise Mertens.
LONDON — Serena Williams has pulled out of the Wimbledon doubles she was due to share with her elder sister Venus, citing the right knee injury she aggravated in her opening-round singles loss. The withdrawal, announced on Saturday, 4 July 2026, ends what had been shaped as a one-match reunion on the doubles draw and turns a feel-good second-week subplot into another exit on the injury ledger.
It was not the only significant departure from the All England Club on Saturday. Hours earlier, third-seeded Elena Rybakina, the 2022 Wimbledon champion, was beaten 7-6 (4), 6-1 by Elise Mertens in the third round — comfortably the most notable upset of the women's draw so far. Together the two results reset the texture of the fortnight: the women's title now travels through a field that no longer includes Rybakina, while the doubles draw loses its biggest gathering occasion before the second Monday.
The doubles that wasn't
Serena Williams' return to Wimbledon had already produced one of the more striking audience numbers in recent tennis memory. Her opening-round singles match on Day 2 drew an average of 1.8 million viewers on ESPN, making it the network's biggest Day 2 Wimbledon audience on record, and reinforcing, however briefly, the commercial gravity the Williams name continues to exert on the tour. The plan, as organisers framed it, was to follow that singles match with a doubles outing alongside Venus, who had flown in to compete at the grass-court Grand Slam for the first time since 2021.
That second appearance will not happen. Williams announced on Saturday that the same right knee injured during the singles loss had not recovered in time for the doubles she had been scheduled to play. The match had already been pushed back a day specifically to give her extra recovery time, a concession from the All England Club that signalled the value it placed on the appearance. In the event, the value could not be cashed. The withdrawal is a small data point in a much longer pattern: Williams has not played a full season since 2022 and has treated each subsequent outing as a single-match exhibition, with the physical cost of preparation now visibly catching up.
Rybakina out, Mertens through
The Rybakina upset has a more direct effect on the competition itself. Mertens, the Belgian ranked 23rd in the world, took the first set in a tie-break and ran away with the second 6-1 on Saturday at the All England Club, meaning the third seed departs the women's singles before the second week. In a tournament where the early rounds had already pruned the field cleanly — Iga Świątek, Aryna Sabalenka and Coco Gauff had all reached the third round without dropping a set — Rybakina's loss is the first major-seed casualty, and immediately opens up the bottom half of the draw.
The Belgian had won only one previous match against a top-ten opponent at a Grand Slam, and her game plan — pinning the big first serve deep, refusing to engage in Rybakina's preferred rallies, mixing slice backhands into the grass-court skid — worked from start to finish. Rybakina, meanwhile, looked a step slow on her movement and finished with more unforced errors than winners in the second set. For her, it confirms a twitchy 18 months since her run to the 2023 Australian Open final: she remains a top-tier ball-striker, but no longer a locked-in quarter-final certainty on grass.
What the ratings tell us
The ESPN figure of 1.8 million average viewers is, in its way, the most consequential number of the week. Wimbledon does not generate Premier-League-style weekly audiences in the United States; its draw is concentrated into two-week windows and skews older and wealthier than most tennis properties. A near-two-million average on Day 2, beating every previous benchmark on the same slot, is the kind of figure that justifies the rights-fee structure ESPN and the All England Club renewed earlier this decade. It also explains why a Williams doubles appearance — even a one-off — was being treated as a marquee event rather than a curiosity.
The economic logic is straightforward. A female athlete over 40 drawing bigger numbers than most active ATP stars is not a circuit anomaly; it is the market confirming that elite women's tennis still runs through a very small number of personalities, and that the personalities retain pricing power long after their competitive peak. Saturday's withdrawal does not change that calculus — Day 2 ratings are banked — but it does underline how fragile such spikes are. The next Williams appearance, if it comes, will draw a similar audience only if the body cooperates.
Stakes for the second week
The draw is now wider open than it appeared on Friday. With Rybakina out, the most credible women's title path runs through Świątek, Sabalenka and Gauff, all of whom have looked comfortable on the grass. The Mertens upset also pulls a winnable section into the quarter-finals for whoever emerges from the fourth round, and extends the Belgian's best Grand Slam run in three years. For the Williams camp, the priority shifts to recovery and to the question every subsequent return now invites: when, and in what form, the next appearance will come. Wimbledon had built the doubles slot around nostalgia; the knee had the final word.
This publication framed the women's draw around the structural reality that the top of the seedings is wide open in 2026, rather than around the familiar angle of a Williams farewell — Serena Williams is, by all available evidence, still deciding what her next appearance looks like, and that uncertainty is itself the story.