Serena Williams will play at Flushing Meadows for the first time since 2022 after the US Tennis Association handed her and Carlos Alcaraz a wild card into the US Open mixed doubles championship on Saturday, pairing a 23-time Grand Slam singles champion with the man defending the men’s title.
Their combined haul of 30 major singles trophies is the headline number, but the pairing is striking for a simpler reason: neither player has spent much of 2026 on a match court. Alcaraz has not competed since April. Williams had not competed at all between the 2022 US Open and this June. Alcaraz’s reaction on X was a single line — “Let’s gooooo!” — after Williams had already teased his singles comeback on Instagram with “Ohhhhh ok. I like seeing this” and “They not ready.”
A return that traces back to 1998
Williams, 44, confirmed she will not enter the singles draw in New York; the final women’s wild card went to Sofia Kenin, the 2020 Australian Open champion. That makes mixed doubles her only event at the tournament she has won six times.
There is symmetry in the choice. Williams’s first Grand Slam title of any kind was the 1998 Wimbledon mixed doubles with Max Mirnyi, and the pair followed it that September by beating Lisa Raymond and Patrick Galbraith 6-2, 6-2 for the US Open mixed crown — a title she collected before any of her six singles championships at the venue.
Her 2026 comeback has been built almost entirely on doubles. She announced her WTA return on 1 June and played at Queen’s Club with Victoria Mboko, winning their opening match before Mboko’s knee injury ended the run. In Berlin, partnering Karolina Muchova, she lost her first match to Erin Routliffe and Giuliana Olmos 6-4, 6-4. The exception came at Wimbledon, where she accepted a singles wild card and lost a first-round match to 20-year-old Maya Joint 6-3, 6-7(6), 6-3, saving a match point in the second-set tie-break before fading in the decider.
Two comebacks running on different clocks
Alcaraz arrives from a very different kind of absence. The 23-year-old won the 2025 US Open final against Jannik Sinner, added the Australian Open in January and had gone 22-3 for the season before a right wrist injury sustained after the Barcelona Open in April cost him both the French Open and Wimbledon. He held his position at world No. 2 throughout, withdrew from Cincinnati during the hard-court swing, and has now confirmed he will defend the title he won in New York a year ago.
Four months out with an injury and four years out of the sport entirely is an unusual thing to have in common, and it explains the wild card as much as the star power does. The mixed doubles event runs before the singles main draw begins on 30 August, which gives Alcaraz competitive reps on Arthur Ashe’s surrounding courts without the load of a best-of-five match. For Williams, it is a low-mileage way back into the stadium where her career effectively ended four years ago.
Four-game sets, 16 teams and $1m at stake
The event Williams and Alcaraz are entering barely resembles the one she won in 1998. The USTA rebuilt mixed doubles last year into a compressed 16-team competition staged before the main tournament, with $1 million going to the winning pair. Matches are best-of-three sets to four games with no-ad scoring and a 10-point tie-break at 4-4; only the final is played over conventional six-game sets.
The redesign drew criticism for squeezing out doubles specialists in favour of singles names, and the 2026 edition answers it with an eight-team qualifying round on Monday, from which two teams advance. The qualifying field is stacked with specialists — Katerina Siniakova and Henry Patten, Gabriela Dabrowski and Harri Heliövaara, Luisa Stefani and Neal Skupski among them.
The main draw opens on Tuesday at Louis Armstrong Stadium, with the first round and quarter-finals compressed into a single day and the semi-finals and final on Wednesday. Waiting there:
- Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori, the two-time defending champions and the only pure doubles pairing to have won the revamped event
- Aryna Sabalenka and Novak Djokovic
- Iga Swiatek and Casper Ruud, beaten finalists in 2025
- Jessica Pegula and Taylor Fritz, plus fellow wild cards Emma Navarro and Tommy Paul
- Elina Svitolina and Gaël Monfils, Leylah Fernandez and Frances Tiafoe, Taylor Townsend and Alexander Zverev
Two rounds on Tuesday is a demanding ask for a player who has completed three competitive matches in four years. It is also the shortest possible route back: win twice and Williams is into a Grand Slam semi-final on Wednesday night, 28 years after her first one in this event.
Sources: [ESPN](https://www.espn.com/tennis/story/_/id/49690958/serena-williams-carlos-alcaraz-play-mixed-doubles-us-open), [US Open](https://www.usopen.org/en_US/news/articles/2026-08-22/williams_and_alcaraz_navarro_and_paul_given_2026_us_open_mixed_doubles_wild_cards.html), [ATP Tour](https://www.atptour.com/en/news/alcaraz-serena-williams-us-open-2026-mixed-doubles), [Olympics.com](https://www.olympics.com/en/news/serena-williams-alcaraz-us-open-mixed-doubles-tennis)
One correction against the research notes carried into this session: the wild card was announced Saturday 22 August, and Williams has now ruled herself out of the singles draw — that spot went to Sofia Kenin.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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