Serena Williams

Serena Williams is often considered the GOAT of women’s tennis. Her Olympic record is but a blip on her overall dominance of tennis in the 21st century. She won four Olympic gold medals, with a singles win in 2012 and three doubles gold medals in 2000 2008, and 2012, playing with her sister, Venus. Serena also played singles and doubles at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.

Through 2022 Serena Williams had won 23 Grand Slam tournaments, with seven wins at the Australian Open, three wins at the French Open, seven Wimbledon titles, and six US Open victories. Her 23 major championships rank second all-time among women, trailing only Margaret Court’s 24, but Court won many of those in the Australian Open in an era when few top players traveled to Australia to compete in that event. Serena’s only challenger for dominance in Grand Slams is likely Steffi Graf, who won 22 Grand Slams, including a 1988 Golden Slam, when she won all four majors and an Olympic gold medal.

Williams won almost $100 million in prize money during her career. Including all tournaments, she won 73 WTA events. She rarely played doubles outside of the Grand Slams, yet she won 14 Grand Slam doubles titles, winning all of them while playing with Venus. She did win six other WTA doubles titles, all but one with Venus, the other while playing with Alexandra Stevenson. Serena also won the 1998 Wimbledon and US Open mixed doubles, playing with Max Mirnyi.

Williams held the #1 ranking for 316 weeks, including 186 consecutive weeks from February 2013 to September 2016. She accomplished this despite overcoming several health issues in her career, and taking time off while pregnant.

Coached by her father, Richard Williams, Serena skipped most junior tournaments as did Venus, and they just trained on their own. She started playing the WTA Tour in 1998 at age 17 and won her first Grand Slam in 1999 at the US Open, with her first WTA title occurring in February of that year at the Open GDF Suez in France. Her last Grand Slam title came at the 2017 Australian Open, a span of 18 years, after which she was out for a year while having a baby. Her last victory of any sort came at the 2020 New Zealand Open, defeating Jessica Pegula in the final.

Serena and her sister, Venus, did all this as the first African-American female champions since Althea Gibson in the 1950s, and overcoming the prejudice which that engendered in the tennis world. Serena never really announced her retirement from competitive tennis, and hinted that she likely never would, but she played what seemed to be her last Grand Slam event at 2021 Wimbledon, when she lost in the first round at age 40.