A five-time singles champ, Venus Williams slipped early in the first set and struggled to regain her form in a loss to fellow wild card Elina Svitolina. “Take your time Venus!” yelled one. Another chimed in: “Heart of a champion!”
“It was fantastic that the All England Club rose to that occasion upward of many, many years ago now, which I’m glad that so much time has passed since that moment,” Williams said before the tournament. “There are still a lot of struggles for women in the workplace and in life around the world, but for sports to take that lead is so important because everyone watches sports. That moment for me was incredible, and it’s still, like, the best moment of my career.
Women still compete for cents on the dollar relative to their male counterparts at many of the most significant events on the tennis schedule. This May in Rome, the winner of the ATP Masters 1000 event — a designation afforded to a tournament one level below a Grand Slam — earned $8.5 million. The winner of the equivalent WTA event won roughly $3.9 million.
The current generation of players feels so secure in the fact of pay equity at Grand Slams that, to many of them, Williams’s legacy is her enduring motivation, not her fight for equality. Asked how aware she was of Williams’s role in securing equal prize money at Wimbledon, 22-year-old top seed Iga Swiatek said she needed to brush up.“I should be more aware, I got to tell you honestly,” Swiatek said. “I was, kind of, 6 years old [in 2007].
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