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    How Tennis Stars Like Andy Murray and Gaël Monfils Handle Aging

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    They consider their bodies and the results on the court to determine when to hang it up.For two decades, men’s tennis pretty much meant Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.Now, Federer is retired and a hobbled Nadal is nearing the end. Djokovic won three Grand Slam events last year, but at 36 he is suddenly struggling, even as he heads into the French Open ranked No. 1.But below Mount Olympus, life is different for tennis mortals. Andy Murray, Stan Wawrinka and Marin Cilic all won Grand Slam events and are still playing, as are Gaël Monfils, Richard Gasquet, Fabio Fognini, Roberto Bautista Agut and Kei Nishikori, players who once cracked the top 10.These players still scuffle along in reduced circumstances, far lower in the rankings than during their halcyon days. These old men of the court — all 34 to 39 years old — win a few matches here and there without much chance of regaining their former glory, yet they keep grinding.Gaël Monfils, 37, celebrating after a win at the 2024 BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells. “Every day I ask myself why I’m still doing this,” he said, before citing his “passion for the game” as his motivation.Michael Owens/Getty ImagesNow, only Monfils, ranked 36th, is even in the top 50. Murray is 75th, while Bautista Agut, Wawrinka, Fognini and Gasquet are from 80th through 124th. Cilic has fallen to 1,063rd but just had a second knee surgery in the hopes of coming back, while Nishikori is ranked 347th and still striving to get back on the court. (The miraculous inverse to all this is Adrian Mannarino, who suddenly at 35 cracked the top 20 for the first time this year.)“Every day I ask myself why I’m still doing this,” Monfils said with a laugh, before citing his “passion for the game” as his motivation. (He has extra incentive: His wife, Elina Svitolina, who is 29 and still in the WTA’s top 20, “pushes me quite a lot.”)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biggest Gap for U.S. World Cup Players: Their Ages

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      The U.S. team includes past champions, veterans of the equal pay fight and 14 players experiencing their first World Cup. How they come together will shape the future.The story seemed like one Alex Morgan might tell around a campfire.Back in the day, the 34-year-old Morgan likes to begin, when players like her needed to find their way to their soccer games, they used something called MapQuest. It wasn’t an app on your smartphone, the kind with a reassuring voice that announced each turn and flashed a digital dot to show your location.It was a website, Morgan said, that generated a map and a list of step-by-step directions, which you had to print out on actual paper. Sometimes it fell to preteen kids like Morgan to read out the turns while a parent drove.“That was such a hard time,” the United States defender Naomi Girma, 23, recalled telling Morgan after hearing the story recently, feigning sympathy. “And she was like, ‘You don’t even know.’”Sports are often about gaps: talent gaps, experience gaps, compensation gaps. And in the weeks and months before the Women’s World Cup that began on Thursday in Australia and New Zealand, the players on the U.S. national women’s soccer team have found an unlikely bond in jokes, jabs and stories related to what may be their most notable feature: a generation gap.The team’s oldest player is Megan Rapinoe, 38, the iconic athlete who recently announced that she would retire after this World Cup and the end of her current professional season. The youngest is Alyssa Thompson, who is 18, just graduated high school and still lives with her parents. At least three of Thompson’s teammates — Morgan, Crystal Dunn and Julie Ertz — have children of their own.Thompson said that her older teammates sometimes play music that she doesn’t recognize, but that the different age groups find a middle ground with Cardi B. Sophia Smith, a 22-year-old forward, said she does recognize the music, though by genre, not by artist. “They sound like what my parents listen to,” she said.Alyssa Thompson, who at 18 is the youngest member of the squad, just graduated high school and still lives with her parents.Joe Puetz/Getty ImagesSmith admitted last month that she never has used a CD player and that she refuses to watch TV shows or movies if the video quality is “grainy.” One exception: videos of the 1999 Women’s World Cup final, a historic victory by the United States that spurred rapid growth of women’s soccer in America. Unlike some of her teammates, Smith has no memory of watching that team play — the final was played more than a year before she was born.Others recall a different game — the 2015 World Cup final, and Carli Lloyd’s stunning goal from midfield — as their touchstone moment. Four of their current teammates have far more vivid memories of that afternoon, because they played in the match.That generation gap, and how the U.S. team deals with it, is likely to be one of the prominent stories of the World Cup. But it is also a symbol of the latest pivotal moment in the evolution of the women’s game: a time of contentious debate about equal pay and human rights, and of battles for investment and demand for equal treatment with men. For the United States, a four-time World Cup winner, this tournament also presents a new, unrelenting challenge from rivals rising to meet the Americans’ level as leaders, spokeswomen and champions.Lindsey Horan, the U.S. team’s co-captain, is one of the veterans who won’t let the younger players forget that they have a role to play in that fight, and that winning games and championships is at the core of it.“There’s always pressure in this team,” said Horan, 29. “We live in pressure, and I think we make that known to any new, younger player coming into this environment that you’re going to live in that for the rest of your career on this national team.”The job for Coach Vlatko Andonovski has been to build a smooth-running machine from parts built in different eras. What makes the task even trickier for him this time is that the players at his disposal have a wide range of experience. Fourteen members of the 23-player roster are World Cup rookies. A few are sliding into roles long patrolled by veterans who are now injured, or retired, or facing their final games. It’s Andonovski’s first World Cup, too. “I’m not worried about the inexperience,” Andonovski said. “In fact, I’m excited about the energy and enthusiasm that the young players bring, the intensity and the drive as well. Actually, I think that will be one of our advantages.”“I’m excited about the energy and enthusiasm that the young players bring, the intensity and the drive as well,” said U.S. Coach Vlatko Andonovski.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBuilding chemistry among teammates isn’t that easy, though, especially when time is running out. Not even regular doses of Cardi B can change that. The team’s recent record reflects its struggles under Andonovski to fit new players into the roster of experienced ones.At the Tokyo Olympics — Andonovski’s first major tournament as U.S. coach — the team finished a disappointing third. Canada beat the Americans to reach the final, then won the gold medal. Just last fall, the United States endured its first three-game losing streak since 1993. One of the losses, to Germany, broke a 71-game winning streak on U.S. soil.The rest of the world, finally, appears to be catching up.Janine Beckie, a forward for Canada, said there were two or three teams at the 2019 World Cup that were strong enough to win it. But now, only four years later, she estimated that six or seven had to be considered serious title contenders.“This is definitely the most wide-open World Cup in history,” Beckie said. “I’m really interested in how this young U.S. team goes through this tournament. They can either have a fresh mind-set and recover quickly from game to game, or they can have players who are overwhelmed by the length of the tournament. Being there for a month from start to finish is really difficult, especially when you haven’t experienced that before.”That is why the older players on the U.S. team have been trying to prepare the newcomers for what to expect. So as they fielded questions about what to pack for a monthlong trip to the other side of the world — headphones, books and a favorite pair of comfy sweatpants were the bare minimum — the older players also have gone out of their way to make the younger players feel as if they have been on the team forever.“The important thing is, how do we make the young players feel comfortable?” said Emily Sonnett, who was a member of the 2019 championship team and this month is back for her second World Cup. “Because if you’re not having fun, why be here? And if you’re not comfortable, how are you ever going to play at your best?”Players young and old have come to learn that leading by example can be infectious. Rapinoe, whose outspokenness has at times made her the public face of her squad and her sport, has said the U.S. team considers it “incredibly important” to use its platform to “represent America and a sense of patriotism that kind of flips that term on its head.”For example, Rapinoe and others, including Morgan and the injured captain Becky Sauerbrunn, have spoken out about social issues like equal pay, sexual abuse, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and racial equality.Megan Rapinoe has said the U.S. team considers it important to “represent America and a sense of patriotism that kind of flips that term on its head.” Marlena Sloss for The New York TimesThe veterans haven’t pushed the younger players to be as involved in the same issues, players on both ends of the generation gap said. But many of the younger ones acknowledged that they feel a sense of duty to keep that aspect of the team alive.Girma said she was inspired by the national team’s activism to speak out about social justice issues while she was in college at Stanford. Shaken by the death of a college teammate there who killed herself, Girma and several of her contemporaries are now using their voices to highlight the need for mental health awareness.Forward Trinity Rodman, 21, said that responsibility is one the newer players have begun to embrace — “I’ve definitely tried to be more than a soccer player,” she said — but that every member of the team was united by a goal they all share.“We want to win so bad,” Rodman said, “and we’re going to do whatever we can to win.”That way, someday, they will have their own campfire stories to tell. More

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      After a Fall, Venus Williams Is Eliminated on Wimbledon’s First Day

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      Williams, a five-time Wimbledon singles champion, was vying, at 43, to become one of the oldest women to win a main draw singles match at the sport’s oldest Grand Slam event.She walked onto the court late on a gray and chilly afternoon with that rocking gait that has become so familiar to tennis fans over the past 25 years. With her tennis bag on her shoulder, she pulled at the ends of an elastic band to get in some last-minute upper-body stretches.Venus Williams, a five-time Wimbledon singles champion and a nine-time finalist, was back on Centre Court on Monday at age 43, vying to become one of the oldest women to win a main draw singles match at the sport’s oldest Grand Slam event.That is not how the day went. It ultimately left her limping, an injured symbol of a couple of undeniable truths about this era of tennis.The first: More players are stretching their careers longer than they ever have, into their late 30s and, in the case of the Williams sisters, into their 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 having two children.The second: It’s difficult to stay healthy and win in this brutal sport in your late 30s and early 40s, unless your name is Novak Djokovic.There were members of the older set scattered all across the All England Club on Monday, the first day of Wimbledon, and not simply in the television booths. Williams took Centre Court after Djokovic, 36, had begun yet another title defense in his usual fashion, beating Pedro Cachín of Argentina in straight sets. The American player John Isner, 38, lost in four sets on Court 16 to Jaume Munar of Spain, but two courts over, on Court 18, Stan Wawrinka, another 38-year-old, was giving a clinic to Emil Ruusuvuori, eliminating the 24-year-old Finn in straight sets.Williams came up short in her effort, a hard-luck, 6-4, 6-3 loss to Elina Svitolina of Ukraine in which Williams aggravated an injured right knee early in the match. Williams never regained the form she had shown in the match’s first few minutes, when she grabbed an early lead and gave every sign that a win for the old guard might be in the cards. Last month, Williams, ranked 558th in the world, beat a player ranked in the top 50 for the first time in four years, outlasting Camila Giorgi of Italy in a third-set tiebreaker in Birmingham, England.The victory helped Williams earn a wild-card entry into the Wimbledon tournament, which she won in five of nine appearances from 2000 to 2008. She made the women’s singles final as recently as 2017, and she has not given any indication that she is pointing at a certain end.“I’m a competitor,” a somber and shaken Williams said in her postmatch news conference. “That’s what I do for a living.”She has been doing it since she was 14.Officials assisted Williams after she fell and clutched her right knee in the first set of the match.Zac Goodwin/Press Association, via Associated PressPlaying on grass that was slick from a midafternoon rain shower and the moisture that lingered in the air throughout the day, Williams came out firing serves and lacing hard, flat shots to the back of the court. She broke Svitolina’s serve in the second game. But facing break point in the third game, Williams charged the net and then crumpled onto the grass with a scream as she clutched her right knee, which was wrapped in a support band.Williams remained on the ground for several minutes, with Svitolina placing a towel under her head for support. It looked as though Williams’s afternoon would end right there. But she got up and limped to her chair, where a trainer examined her. Afterward, her movement was far more limited than it had been in the first two games.She hobbled through points and struggled to generate the power from her groundstrokes and her serve that has long been the signature of her game but requires the ability to push and torque with the lower half of her body. The speed of her first serve dropped from 115 miles per hour early in the match to the mid-90s.“I was literally killing it — then I got killed by the grass,” Williams said. “It’s not fun right now.”The sequence of events had an eerie familiarity. Two years ago, her sister Serena walked onto the same court for her first-round match, seeking her eighth Wimbledon title at age 39. The effort lasted just six games: Serena Williams had to withdraw in the first round because of an ankle injury.Serena Williams returned to Wimbledon last year at the start of what seems to have been a final summer of professional tennis, though one never knows these days. She lost in the first round in three sets on an evening that had the feel of a farewell.What was striking about her older sister’s match Monday was how little it felt like a valedictory, and how defiant Venus Williams seemed as she faced the toll that aging exacts on every athlete, regardless of her ability.She said she was in shock at being injured, though older athletes are far more injury-prone.“I just can’t believe this happened,” she said. “It’s, like, bizarre.”She was angry at how the match had ended. On match point, Svitolina hit a ball that was called out, but the chair umpire gave her the match when the Hawk-Eye system showed it was in. Williams’s return of the shot had been wide, and the umpire ruled that the point would not be replayed. Williams skipped the postmatch handshake with the umpire.She said the injury had been so painful that it had prevented her from focusing. She said that she had never considered stopping and that she would have her knee checked on Tuesday. Moments later, she was talking about the difficulty of processing another injury after recovering from a hamstring injury at the start of the year.She has been missing from the tour for a while. It is not what she wants for herself in her early 40s.“Hopefully I can just figure out what’s happening with me and move forward,” she said.For nearly 30 years, that has meant one thing: back to the tennis court. More

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      Are We Missing Out When Athletes Retire on Top?

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      To witness the humbling of champions — and to see them endure it with dignity and grit — might be one of the great things sports has to teach us.A hero’s journey, ending in a wrenching farewell — sports historians will debate whether Roger Federer was the greatest men’s tennis player of all time, but few will deny that he was among its most dignified. Last month, the 41-year-old, 20-time major champion made official what had felt inevitable for some time: The ravages of age, culminating with a recent knee surgery, finally persuaded him to retire. A hastily arranged final appearance at the Laver Cup in London quickly morphed into a send-off for the Swiss superstar, a Festival of Fed. He teamed up with his friendly rival Rafael Nadal for a doubles match, a contest that felt mostly like an excuse to watch a legend take the court one last time. The raucous aftermath included an emotional on-court interview with a fellow great, Jim Courier. Federer’s current peers were there, all reverential, as was a teeming audience, eager to see him off. Was this the end, or merely the end of the beginning? Sportswriters are required to use phrases like “ravages of age” when discussing an athlete in decline, but truth be told, it’s a bit of a reach when describing Federer’s goodbye. Trim and suave in a royal blue zip-up and a signature Rolex (one of his longtime sponsors), he scarcely gave the appearance of a man facing down senescence — just a man acknowledging the fact he can’t go five sets deep with Novak Djokovic the way he used to. And while much of the celebration felt delightfully genuine and spontaneous, that’s not the same as saying it wasn’t calculated. To be an icon in the modern sports firmament is to give as much consideration to narrative as your average Shakespeare scholar, and scripting your career to a happy ending serves many purposes.A similar curtain call occurred a few weeks earlier, when the 23-time major champion Serena Williams finished her storied career with a spirited run into the third round of the U.S. Open, a tournament she first won in 1999. Williams and her older sister Venus have been fixtures of the American sports landscape for so long that it is at once impossible to imagine it without them and head-spinning to contemplate the length of their dominance. When Williams addressed the stadium after her last appearance, the assembled crowd responded with an operatic outpouring that exceeded even Federer’s rapturous farewell. (If your heart did not proceed directly to your throat when Serena wept and said she would be no one without her older sister, you either don’t love tennis or need to see a doctor.)For the aging athlete to continue grinding away is in some ways a noble act.Serena, like Federer, is 41 and considered by many to be the sport’s greatest of all time. Their playing days might be behind them, but each remains a global icon, and status as a global icon is a bit like a Supreme Court appointment: Once you have it, it’s your job for life. It’s also a lucrative one. The idea that a star athlete might be worth more money retired than active isn’t exactly new — Arnold Palmer’s career golf earnings were $2 million, while the bulk of his estimated $700 million estate was earned through endorsements long after his competitive days were over — but in a world crazed for both content and heroes, the stakes of making a narratively canny exit feel higher than ever. Legacy-building cannot be left to chance. Federer has already been the focus of multiple documentaries; Williams has been chronicled in a five-part HBO series and had her youth depicted, alongside her sister’s, in last year’s Oscar-winning dramatization “King Richard.” The incentive to make the leap from player to personality while still adjacent to the winner’s circle is immense.Roger Federer’s Farewell to Professional TennisThe Swiss tennis player leaves the game with one of the greatest competitive records in history.An Appraisal: “He has, figuratively and literally, re-embodied men’s tennis, and for the first time in years, the game’s future is unpredictable,” the author David Foster Wallace wrote of Roger Federer in 2006.A Poignant Send-Off: Wimbledon may have been more fitting. But the Laver Cup, which Federer helped create, offered a sensible final act for one of the greatest players of this era.Two Great Rivals: When players retire from individual sports like tennis, their rivalries go with them. Here is a look at some of the best matches that pitted Federer against Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.Tennis After Federer: The Swiss player, along with Nadal and Djokovic, helped define a remarkably durable period in men’s tennis history. Following behind is a new generation of hungry players, ready to muscle their way into the breach.This was not always the case — far from it. The edges of sports history are littered with specters like the aging Johnny Unitas, fecklessly playing out the string as a San Diego Charger, and Willie Mays, slumming as a past-his-prime New York Met. No complete biography of either man will ever be written without some significant reference to those sad and flailing years, in which they burned off parts of their legacy for a few final paychecks and a chance at adulation — the part where the great man, taking the field, commands his body to perform the old heroic acts and is betrayed, again and again, by those “ravages of age.” Personally, I am ambivalent about the much tidier exits of today’s greats. I sort of miss the tragic model. For the aging athlete to continue grinding away, even as their physical prowess begins to fail them, is in some ways a noble act of self-effacement, an abandonment of personal vanity, a repayment of the karmic debt of their natural abilities. We as a society currently stand at the intersection of modern medicine, baby-boomer vivacity and magical thinking, indulging in adult-adolescent fantasies of eternal youth, waving away the menacing creep of time. If sports is a metaphor for life — and it better be, for all the time it takes — I wonder if on some level we don’t do ourselves a disservice by watching our heroes bow out on a grace note. Parts of life’s ride are going to get ugly; injury, loss and defeat are coming for us all. To witness, in real time, the humbling of great athletes — and to see them endure it with dignity and grit, even as the outcomes carry them further and further from former glory — might be one of the great things sports has to teach us. Over these last few months, a miracle occurred that split the difference. Albert Pujols is 42 and in his 22nd season playing major-league baseball. For the first 10 years of that career, he was basically Babe Ruth — a hitter of such generational talent that it strained credulity. Over the second 10 years, he went from pretty good to mediocre to downright bad, and many a commentator remarked on how sad it was to see a once-perfect hitter break down. And yet Pujols persisted, catching on as a bench player with the Los Angeles Dodgers after being released by another team, and finally rejoining his original team, the St. Louis Cardinals, for one more year. It was, essentially, a sentimental gesture.But then something weird happened: He got really, really good again. His swing locked in. He started hitting home runs at his early career rate, passing 700 for his career, a huge benchmark in baseball. He led his team to a division title. It all came out of nowhere, the most romantic possible outcome for a player who had — in many people’s eyes — come to serve as a cautionary tale, an argument for getting out while the getting’s good.That’s one last thing about sports, and life: The difference between demonstrating resilience and toiling in self-delusion is not so easy to parse. Pujols recently revealed that as late as this June, he had become so dejected about his play that he nearly quit. It turned out, happily, that there was one last chapter to be written. It reminds me of a favorite lyric, from the band Drive-By Truckers: “There’s something to be said for hanging in there/Past the point of hanging around too long.”Source photographs: Matthew Stockman/Getty Images; Stacy Revere/Getty Images; Paul Crock/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images; Greg Wood/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images; Getty Images. More

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      At the French Open, Serena Williams Moves to the Fourth Round

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      At the French Open, the 23-time Grand Slam singles champion defeated her fellow American Danielle Collins, 6-4, 6-4, in her most convincing performance of the week.PARIS — Serena Williams’s tennis dress was green and billowed in the breeze. The tape on her right thigh was white and tight.It was a fashion clash, surely not what Williams had in mind when she approved this French Open ensemble. But the tape was a fitting symbol of her determination and persistence at age 39.Williams is not at her peak, and she looked rusty indeed when she returned to the tour and the red clay in Italy last month. But she is serving and scrapping her way into a much better place in Paris, and on an overcast Friday afternoon at a lightly populated center court, she produced her most convincing performance of the week to defeat a fellow American, Danielle Collins, 6-4, 6-4.The match was less straightforward and symmetrical than the score. Collins, who reached the quarterfinals at Roland Garros last year, led by 4-1 in the second set after holding serve at love. The momentum appeared to have shifted, but Williams lifted, Collins dipped, and Williams did not lose another game.“Today in particular, this whole week thus far, I just needed a win,” Williams said. “I needed to win tough matches. I needed to win sets. I needed to win being down. I needed to find me, know who I am. Nobody else is Serena out here. It’s me. It’s pretty cool.”The one and only Serena is now back in the fourth round of the French Open, which is not unusual for a player who has won 23 Grand Slam singles titles but is extraordinary at this advanced stage of her game.“I needed to find me, know who I am. Nobody else is Serena out here.”Pete Kiehart for The New York TimesShe is the oldest woman to reach the round of 16 in singles at Roland Garros in the Open era, surpassing her older sister Venus, who was 36 when she reached that round in Paris in 2017.“I personally can’t imagine still playing at this level at almost 40 years old,” said Chanda Rubin, a former top 10 player who is now a Tennis Channel analyst. “People get used to things, and we’re all guilty of it. You start seeing it more often, and it becomes less amazing, but what she’s doing is still amazing to me.”Success among older athletes is all the rage with Phil Mickelson winning the P.G.A. Championship last month at 50, Tom Brady winning a Super Bowl in February at 43 and Sue Bird winning a W.N.B.A. title last year at 39.There is clearly a role-modeling effect underway. Venus, who will turn 41 on June 17, is fading but still on tour, playing with tape and day-to-day pain of her own yet still hitting winners past women half her age.Roger Federer, who will turn 40 in August, remains in contention at this French Open after looking quick off the mark again on Thursday as he defeated his longtime rival Marin Cilic in four sets on the same patch of red clay where Williams beat Collins in cooler, heavier conditions.Seven Americans played third-round singles matches on Thursday, including four men: John Isner, Steve Johnson, Reilly Opelka and Marcos Giron. Williams was the only American to prevail, and I asked the 27-year-old Collins afterward if seeing Williams and other icons succeed late into their 30s and beyond made her view her own future differently.“I think that should give a lot of different athletes confidence, younger athletes especially, not to put as much pressure on themselves,” Collins said. “You’re seeing some of the greatest athletes in the world have some of their best success once they’re a little bit older. I think that goes to the maturity, the experience that they have at that point. It just shows how much of sports is a mental game, more so than just a physical game. It should give players confidence to see somebody like Serena or Tom Brady or Phil Mickelson.”Of course, Williams, Federer, Brady and Mickelson were all young phenoms before they became enduring superstars. What made them exceptional initially has helped keep them exceptional, but they have also had to adapt: training differently, eating more carefully and, in the cases of Williams and Federer, competing more efficiently.“Serena has had to make adjustments, just like Roger, to remain a factor at the majors,” Rubin said. “Look at Roger, being more aggressive and moving in, taking on that challenge, so I think that kind of adaptability is a requirement.”Even so, it has been quite some time since they reaped tennis’s biggest rewards. Federer’s last major singles title came at the Australian Open in 2018; Williams’s came at the Australian Open in 2017, when she was two months pregnant with her daughter, Olympia.Serena Williams acknowledged the crowd after her win on Friday.Pete Kiehart for The New York TimesBut both have continued to give themselves major opportunities: two match points for Federer in the 2019 Wimbledon final against Djokovic; four different Grand Slam finals for Williams since her return from maternity leave.The odds of winning another major are against them. Federer, who will play Saturday night against Dominik Koepfer in the third round, is still in the half of the men’s singles draw with Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. But Williams’s section of the women’s draw has opened up promisingly. At No. 7, she is the highest seed left in the bottom half after No. 3 seed Aryna Sabalenka experienced her latest Grand Slam setback by losing, 6-4, 2-6, 6-0, on Friday to Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova.The only Grand Slam singles champions left in the bottom half are Williams and Victoria Azarenka, who is not at her most dangerous on clay. There is also Marketa Vondrousova, a left-handed Czech who reached the final here in 2019.“There are some real challenges in front of Serena, but of course it’s possible,” Rubin said. “If you look at who’s left in her half, she has to feel pretty good about her chances. She can go toe-to-toe in any of those matches and lose them, but they are also winnable. That’s what you want, and she has to be feeling better about her game after seeing how she handled a tough challenge against Collins today.”Williams served and competed well, and will need more of the same in the next round when she faces Elena Rybakina, a 21-year-old who is seeded 21st. Rybakina, who was born and raised in Moscow, now represents Kazakhstan and has Williams-level power.But Rybakina has never faced Williams and never played a match of this magnitude. Even at 39 on her least favorite surface, Williams deserves to be the favorite. More