Skip to main content

Knicks, Taylor Swift, World Cup: Is Serena Williams at the US Open next in the Summer of New York?

LONDON (AP) — Serena Williams could be up next in the Summer of New York.

After the Knicks’ first NBA championship in more than 50 years, Taylor Swift’s wedding at Madison Square Garden and the World Cup final to be played just across the Hudson River, it looks like another circus is coming to town.

To the Flushing Meadows section of Queens, to be precise.

All indications point to the 44-year-old Williams playing the U.S. Open next month for the first time in four years.

“Her intention is to keep playing; the U.S. Open as well,” Rennae Stubbs, one of Williams’ coaches, said at Wimbledon on Tuesday — a week after Serena lost in her first singles match since 2022.

Williams injured her right knee midway through a three-set loss to Maya Joint at the All England Club and withdrew from a doubles match with older sister Venus on Saturday.

Williams shared an Instagram update over the weekend that included images of four syringes filled with fluid drained from her knee.

“As long as physically she can go — and I’m hoping in a few weeks that’s the case — to get her back on the court and hitting balls,” Stubbs said.

Main draw singles play at the U.S. Open starts Aug. 30.

“All I can say,” Serena said after her loss, “is stay tuned to a city near you.”

‘It will be huge’

James Blake, the Yonkers, New York, native who reached the U.S. Open quarterfinals twice, knows just what Williams will bring to the tournament.

“It will be huge and it’s deserved because she’s the greatest of all time on the women’s side – and an American,” Blake said of the 23-time Grand Slam champion. “She’s an idol for so many young girls.”

Blake is now the Miami Open tournament director and a tennis commentator for ESPN.

“She’s been through this for the last 20 years so she knows what a circus it will be and she’s willing to put herself through that,” Blake told The Associated Press. “That shows how much she loves the game and she loves the competition.”

Added doubles great Bob Bryan: “Serena is a legend. Everyone wants to see her on the court again. It’s a great story.”

Williams practiced at Bryan’s club in Florida earlier this year.

“She wasn’t giving away too much information but she was getting 12 rackets strung. … So we knew she was serious,” Bryan said. “Hopefully she gets healthy and can make a run this summer. She’s going to win again for sure. She’s a champion.”

Warmup tournaments

Williams played only two doubles matches — but no singles — before Wimbledon. Expect her to play more singles before the U.S. Open.

If she desires, Williams should have no problem obtaining wild card invitations from tournament organizers at U.S. Open warmups in Toronto and Cincinnati, Ohio.

“I know that for her, trying to play certainly something before the U.S. Open will be something she would like to do,” Stubbs said. “But at the same time it’s going to depend on how physically she’s doing.”

Knee issue

In Williams’ social media post about her injury, she said “the good news is my knee shouldn’t swell or collect that much fluid again.”

Still, it was more of a factor against Joint than many people thought, according to Stubbs.

“She did whisper to me, ‘I would have won if I had a good knee,’” Stubbs said. “Leading up to the tournament, she was playing practice sets (and) beating players that are still in the tournament. I won’t mention which ones because I don’t want to embarrass them but she was playing well.”

Despite being away for so long, Williams still hit serves beyond 120 mph and showed off her same old heavy groundstrokes, which landed within inches of the baseline.

The only real issue was her movement.

“Considering how bad the knee was it’s pretty miraculous really that she went as long as she did in the match,” Stubbs said. “She was rubbing her legs every change of end. … So I could see that there was something going on that was a little unusual for her.

“But the fact that she got through, walked off the court and nobody even really knew was pretty miraculous. And it also shows how high her pain tolerance is.”

Hard courts

After the grass of Wimbledon, the hard courts of the U.S. Open — which she has won six times in singles — could be more favorable for Williams.

“Everybody saw her standard was still pretty good and so once she gets on the hard courts she’s going to have better stability,” Stubbs said. “We all know how well she plays on hard courts so it’s just a matter of getting her body back in into the shape she wants.”

Added retired player Caroline Wozniacki, one of Williams’ best friends: “I thought she moved well already on the grass. … She didn’t win the more important points in the match, but she did a good job. I would expect her to just keep doing better as this comeback progresses.”

Match toughness

Williams was broken only once as she lost the opening set to Joint. Then she won the second in a tiebreaker and didn’t really fade away until midway through the third.

“I’m sure just playing a few matches will get her more precise,” Blake said. “She missed one easy ball and then things unraveled a little bit. When she’s at her best that turns into one point instead of a game or two games or three games. She’ll get back to being match-tough.

“If she plays three or four matches before the U.S. Open,” Blake added, “it will be — not an entirely different player — but quite an improvement by the U.S. Open.”

___

AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis

Prediction markets allow people to bet on wildfires. Experts fear it will fuel arson

(CNN) — When the Eaton fire swept through the Los Angeles neighborhood of Altadena last year, it claimed 19 lives and incinerated thousands of buildings — one of which was the home of Kaitlyn Trudeau’s grandfather. His house burned to the ground; he lost everything. But while he grappled with trauma, others saw dollar signs in the disaster.In January 2025, as the LA wildfires raged, people placed bets on Polymarket, one of the leading prediction market platforms. They waged money on how how many acres the fires would consume, which locations the flames would reach and when they would be contained.It was “pretty dystopian,” said Trudeau, a California-based climate scientist, who works at the non-profit Climate Central. “It’s not just easy to start a fire — now there’s potentially a financial incentive,” she told CNN this week, as she traveled to Altadena to see her grandfather’s house for the first time since it burned down.Polymarket is part of a booming, multibillion-dollar industry, which allows people to bet on the outcome of almost any future event, from the results of football games and elections, to the number of social media posts Elon Musk makes.Some prediction markets also allow people to bet on wildfires, as well as other climate change-fueled extreme weather events, and experts are sounding the alarm. They fear it risks incentivizing arson and, more generally, that it will distance people from the suffering fires bring.“I worry that it encourages people to think about these events like they are video games, not real-world disasters,” Trudeau said.Polymarket says its platform is a valuable source of information during disasters. “People turn to the news for commentary and they come to Polymarket for information,” a spokesperson said. “While we are not blind to the risks, removing these markets does not prevent a tragedy but makes the most accurate information less accessible to the people who need it most.”People have been betting on the weather long before the dawn of the internet, said Lauren Ducat, a clinical and forensic psychologist based in Australia who studies firesetting. But the accessibility of online platforms has the potential to make these wagers “more pervasive and open them to larger markets,’ she said.Polymarket says what it does is distinct from gambling. The company doesn’t use the term “bets,” instead people “trade on future event outcomes,” and users compete against each other not against the “house.”The Polymarket team creates markets, with input from users, by formulating questions to which the answer is usually “yes” or “no.” Users buy shares in an outcome for between $0 and $1. If “yes” shares are trading at $0.65 each, for example, that means the market thinks there’s a 65% chance of that outcome happening. Shares in the correct outcome are paid out at $1 each.Polymarket may be one of the biggest platforms of its kind, but it’s not alone. Another site called WyldFyre focuses on California fires and has the tagline: “You can’t predict fire. But you can trade on it.” It doesn’t use any form of real-world currency yet, but experts are still worried about the signal these sites send.The problem with wildfires — unlike hurricanes or earthquakes — is that humans can directly influence them. “Anybody can set a wildfire,” said Ed Nordskog, a retired Los Angeles County Sheriff’s arson investigator and profiler.Nordskog said he would normally play something like this down, especially as only a tiny number of people ever commit arson. But through his work he has noticed a strong connection between obsessive gambling and fire setting. “A surprising number of (arsonists) set their fires near casinos that they frequent on a daily basis,” he said.There is still little data on the topic, Nordskog added, but “this has some disturbing possibilities.”Arson is not the sole concern. People could choose to influence fires that have already started. A firefighter, for example, could be incentivized to let a fire burn a little longer to win a bet on acres burned.There have already been suggestions people may be going to some lengths to secure payouts. On April 6, evening temperatures at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris suddenly spiked by several degrees Fahrenheit, according to sensors located on the site. It happened again on April 15.This data was being used for Polymarket trades, and the unusual heat resulted in some big payouts for those who had bet on Paris reaching seemingly unlikely levels of heat. Speculation was rife; one unproven theory was that someone had heated the sensor with a hairdryer.French national weather service Météo-France has filed a police complaint “for alteration of the operation of an automated data processing system,” a spokesperson said.Polymarket said “we comprehensively surveil for illegal activity” and the transparency of its blockchain-based platform allows it to “efficiently identify and trace potential wrongdoers.”There are also ethical questions at play. “Betting on someone’s potential death or harm devalues human life,” said Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics at Santa Clara University.It could also minimize the seriousness of fires, potentially even blocking community efforts to reduce them by “normalizing” fire and distancing people from its effects, said Theresa Gannon, a professor of forensic psychology at the University of Kent in the UK.However, there can also be benefits to these markets, experts say. Research by Kim Kaivanto, an economist at Lancaster University Management School, found expert prediction markets can be valuable tools for climate forecasting — if they have guardrails.Kaivanto is the director of CRUCIAL, a prediction market designed to forecast climate-related risks such as hurricanes. Its markets are made up of teams of experts who don’t pay to play, but are rewarded with “credits” in proportion to how much accurate information they bring in, Kaivanto said.Whether prediction markets could aggregate useful data for forecasting wildfires remains an open question.It’s unclear how betting could improve a forecast, said Craig B. Clements, director of the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center based at San José State University, “there are many complexities to fire spread.”A spokesperson for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said its fire modeling is “not informed by markets, wagering systems, crowd predictions, or any other form of prediction‑market mechanism” and it is not currently considering using this kind of data.The US Forest Service said the same. “We do not rely on any system that treats wildfire as an event for speculation,” a spokesperson said. Some proponents suggest that prediction markets could be an alternative to insurance, especially as insurers pull out of regions at high-risk for wildfire. Trudeau senses danger, though. It “could so easily be used to prey on people who can’t insure their homes, to play off their fear and make money from it,” she said.One other surprising benefit could be to shift people’s attitudes to climate change, according to recent research. Taking part in prediction markets “actually changes your brain on the topic,” said Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist at Columbia Business School, who co-authored the study.If climate deniers make money betting on climate disasters happening, they “start to see that there’s truth out there, which otherwise you reject,” Cerf said. “Eventually it leaks into your psyche.”That doesn’t mean he’s an unwavering proponent of the prediction market platforms in their current form, however. “It’s the Wild West,” he said. “They basically chase whatever makes money.”There are attempts to apply some guardrails. In March, California Governor Gavin Newsom strengthened a ban on insider trading by state officials on prediction market platforms. And representatives from Utah and California introduced bipartisan legislation to prohibit trades on “terrorism, assassination, war, gaming… or illegal activity.”But for now, the sector is booming and people continue to put their money on deadly climate disasters happening.In the comments section of a trade last year on the Palisades fire, one Polymarket user wrote: “That was fun. Thanks everyone. Until the next time!”The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
Read Next Story

Related News

Prediction markets allow people to bet on wildfires. Experts fear it will fuel arson

Bronze Age ‘shaman,’ previously assumed to be a male metalworker, was actually a woman

At least 2 dead in Texas floods as hundreds rescued in same region as Camp Mystic disaster