Serena Williams and Karolina Muchova Lose First Round at Berlin Open 2026

Serena Williams ran into her first setback of this comeback on Tuesday in Berlin, where she and her new doubles partner Karolina Muchova lost 6-4, 6-4 to the well-established pairing of Giuliana Olmos and Erin Routliffe in the opening round of the Berlin Open, and it came in only the second match of a return to tennis that had begun with a victory just one week earlier.

The comeback had begun on a much happier note at Queen's Club in London the week before, where Williams played her first professional match since the 2022 US Open alongside Canadian teenager Victoria Mboko, and the pair won that opening match in front of an excited crowd, only for the partnership to end the very next day when Mboko picked up a knee injury during a singles encounter.

This time around in the Berlin, things were far more difficult because Olmos and Routliffe managed to break serve once in each set and converted two of their four chances to do so, while Williams and Muchova never quite found a way to break back themselves, despite forcing several deuce points along the way that kept the match feeling close right until the end.

None of that seemed to bother the spectators packed into the stadium, who erupted into applause the moment Williams walked onto the court and kept that energy going throughout the entire match, offering her the same warm welcome she has received everywhere she has played since coming back.

Just hours before the match had began, it became official that Williams would team up with her sister Venus for women's doubles at Wimbledon after the pair were awarded a wildcard into the tournament starting June 29, and once the Berlin match had ended, Williams told reporters that the whole idea had come from her eight-year-old daughter Olympia, who had simply told her mother that she should play with Venus, something Williams said she could not really argue with.

Sportscapefeels that losing a first-round doubles match rarely makes headlines in professional tennis, yet Williamscurrently exists in a category of her own where every appearance carries weight beyond the actual scoreline, and with Wimbledon already locked in and a reunion with Venus waiting just around the corner, this defeat in Berlin looks far more like a passing moment than anything resembling the real story still to come.