The Williams sisters came to Rio with a flawless 15-0 record in Olympic doubles, having captured three gold medals in Sydney, Beijing, and London.
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The 27-year-old Millman swept past Ricardas Berankis in just 50 minutes, making it a miserable summer for the Lithuanian. These were her fifth Olympics.
Djokovic’s defeat came on a day where the Williams sisters, reigning champions, suffered their first ever defeat at the Games in 16 matches. We’ve had so many Olympic doubles golds, so many grand slam championships. Serena is still Serena, No. 1 in the world. It wasn’t to be though as they lost three games in a row thereafter and were dumped out of the doubles event at the Olympics. The Czechs, relatively new partners, had never won a match together.
According to United States Fed Cup captain Mary Joe Fernandez, Venus played Saturday’s match while dealing with illness and one has to wonder if the ailment played a role in her productivity Sunday as well.
Whatever the cause, Williams opened defense of her Olympic singles gold medal with a patchy-at-times 6-4, 6-2 victory over Australia’s Daria Gavrilova on Sunday, gesturing or yelling at herself as she often does when not all goes her way. Of Serena at the net yelling “cross”, but Venus failing to cover.
Bronte Campbell, second left, and Cate Campbell, right, show off the gold medals they won on the first night in Rio.
“It was not our best day”, said Venus who will be 40 when the next Olympics rolls around in 2020 in Tokyo.
She said: “It was really intense. We wish them the best of luck and we´ll get ready for the US Open”.
“The conditions definitely didn’t make it easy”, said Williams, the London 2012 Olympic champion and victor of 22 Grand Slams.
And then she and Strycova started laughing.
“That’s true, but we are really good friends”. I wouldn’t actually say it was devastating, it was a lot of fun, and we’ll always remember these moments, these matches.
“I wasn’t playing the way I needed to play”, Serena said. We played awful and that basically showed in the results.
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The Venus and Serena team is not finished. Serena was determined to storm through her first set in Rio as her game looked to be working for her and she found herself a game away from a one-set edge.
