Venus Williams will never have this all-time tennis record taken away from her.
Williams is still competing on the WTA Tour at 46 years old, and is scheduled to make her return to competition at the Guangzhou Open.
This is where she will hope to win her first singles match this year, with Williams currently on a 15-match losing streak after her first round exit at the US Open.
While Williams has struggled to find form this year, that does not change the WTA record that she will never have taken away from her.
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Venus Williams is the only player to have won the WTA Finals, WTA Elite Trophy and the Grand Slam Cup
Williams has won 49 titles in her career, with three of those being at year-end tournaments where players have to qualify.
The first of those came at the Grand Slam Cup, which was an event designed for players who had performed the best at the four major tournaments in that year.
There were two years where a women’s edition of this was held, and Williams won the inaugural Grand Slam Cup in 1998, which was just her third ever WTA title win.
Williams had not won a Grand Slam title at this point, but she was a seven-time major champion by the time she won the WTA Finals. Williams was only making her third appearance at the WTA Finals that year, and despite being the seventh of eight seeds was able to go all the way to winning the title in Doha in 2008.
This is the only time Williams won the WTA Finals, but she did win one more year-end event in 2015 at the WTA Elite Trophy. Like with the Grand Slam Cup, Williams was the inaugural winner of the WTA Elite Trophy, which had the ninth to 19th best players competing in it.
Williams is the only player in history who has won the WTA Finals, the WTA Elite Trophy and the Grand Slam Cup. With the Grand Slam Cup and the WTA Elite Trophy no longer existing, Williams will never have this record taken away from her.
What happened when Venus Williams made her last appearance at the WTA Finals?
Williams would only win one more title in her singles career after winning the WTA Elite Trophy in 2015, but she would return to the WTA Finals once again.
In a hugely resurgent season in 2017, Venus Williams would reach her first Grand Slam final in eight years at the Australian Open, where she would lose to her older sister, Serena. This was one of two Grand Slam finals Venus would make that year, having also reached the Wimbledon final and the US Open semi-finals.
This enabled Venus to return to the WTA Finals for the first time in eight years, where she would make it all the way to another big final after beating the likes of Garbine Muguruza and Jelena Ostapenko. This made her the oldest ever player to reach the final of the WTA Finals at 37 years old and four months, but Venus was ultimately beaten by Caroline Wozniacki in that final.
“I didn’t seem to come up with my best tennis until it was too late,” Williams said after the match. “I love being here, it is an honour. Only eight players get to be here and I hope to return.”
Venus Williams is no longer at the level to qualify for the WTA Finals, but she is still competing on the WTA Tour nine years later.
