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Venus Williams has shown she can still beat the very best at 43. The plant-based seven-time Grand Slam champion, playing in Cincinnati on a wildcard, knocked out No. 16 seed Veronika Kudermetova 6-4, 7-5 in the first round of the Western & Southern Open on Monday, the WTA reports.
It was a proper comeback. Kudermetova led 4-1 in both sets and had two set points in the second, but Williams, ranked No. 533, won through two rain delays for her first win over a top-20 player since this same event in 2019. It's 26 years since she reached her first Grand Slam final at the 1997 US Open.
Definitely satisfaction from today is [from] all the work that goes into just being here at all. I did my best to be here as soon as possible in the best form possible I could bring in that amount of time. So that makes it satisfying, to be able to get a win with very little time to prepare.
Williams changed the way she ate after she was diagnosed with Sjögren's syndrome in 2011, an autoimmune condition that can cause extreme fatigue and joint pain. On her doctor's advice she started with a raw, plant-based diet, and later added cooked plant foods such as rice, potatoes and lentils because eating only raw food was too hard to keep up, she told Insider:
That way of eating was just hard to maintain for long periods of time. Sometimes you just need something more substantial, some rice, some potatoes, after a workout.
Lentils are one of her favorite post-training meals. Sky Sports named her alongside Chris Smalling, Lawrence Okolie and Lewis Hamilton as top athletes who have overhauled their diets to improve their performance.
Okolie kept his WBO world title in March, and last month Hamilton took a record ninth Hungarian pole. In tennis, plant-based Hubert Hurkacz beat Daniil Medvedev to win in Halle last year, and Novak Djokovic won his 10th Australian Open in January.
Age is just a number.