The most impressive athletic feat anyone has pulled off so far at the Mubadala D.C. Open didn’t occur on a tennis court, but on the leafy walkways and concourses connecting the tournament’s corporate offices to the players’ area. It was performed not by a tennis player but by the tournament’s longtime chair, Mark Ein, who covered those several hundred yards — in dress shoes and sport coat, his cell phone pressed to his ear — well, faster than anyone could have reasonably expected from a 61-year-old.
Ein, at that instant, was on a desperate mission to salvage a sizable chunk of the tournament’s star factor.
It was 1:10 p.m. Saturday and Ein had just gotten a call from Andrea Preti, the husband of tennis legend Venus Williams, informing him that Williams’ intended doubles partner, Alexandra Eala, had scratched at the eleventh hour. With the 2 p.m. deadline for doubles entries looming, they had 50 minutes and ticking to find Williams a replacement. Ein didn’t wait to finish the call before rushing out his office door and down the walkways.
Upon bursting into the players’ dining area, the first person he saw was Diana Shnaider, a 22-year-old Russian and the 18th-ranked women’s tennis player in the world, having lunch with her support team.
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“Diana,” Ein said, catching his breath, “how would you like to play doubles this week with Venus Williams?”
For the roughly 3,000 fans who crammed into the outlying John Harris Court at the Rock Creek Park Tennis Center on Monday for an up-close glimpse of tennis royalty — the 46-year-old Williams owns seven Grand Slam singles titles and another 14 in doubles — then crammed in again Wednesday evening for their quarterfinal match, they have Ein’s resourcefulness and Shnaider’s intrepidness to thank for the experience.
And Williams, on a miserable run of bad luck with her choice of doubles partners of late, may have just accidentally hit upon a solution to her problem.
Despite having never played together before, Williams and Shnaider demonstrated an uncanny degree of chemistry in winning Monday’s first-round match, 6-3, 6-4, over American Quinn Gleason and Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri, before falling in Wednesday night’s quarterfinals to Chinese duo Qianhui Tang and Yifan Xu, 6-4, 6-2.
If one thing has defined the first half of this year’s D.C. Open, it is the slow bleed-off of A-list American stars, both male and female, from the tournament draw. Among those joining Williams in departing well short of the weekend are hometown legend and sixth seed Frances Tiafoe; fifth-seeded Learner Tien, the 16th-ranked men’s player in the world; and Madison Keys, the 2025 Australian Open champ and sixth seed in the women’s draw. All lost their first-round matches.
For Williams, as with many American players, the D.C. stop on the North American hard-court circuit holds a special place in her heart. It’s no coincidence she chose this tournament as the site of her own return to the game last summer following a 16-month absence. (Her singles victory here a year ago over Peyton Stearns at age 45 made her the second-oldest player in history to win a singles match, but she is 0-12 since in singles, including a loss Tuesday night to Austria’s Anastasia Potapova. Williams entered Wednesday ranked 664th in the world in singles, 124th in doubles.)
“You can just feel it from the fans,” Williams said. “They’re ride or die.”
To the extent that Williams’ radiance permitted anyone to pay attention to Shnaider, they would have noticed, above all else, the incredulous smile that seemed to be plastered across the young Russian’s face between points and during changeovers. It was the same smile that Ein encountered on Saturday — “Absolutely giddy,” he described her — when he presented the offer of being Williams’ partner.
“It was definitely the right choice,” Shnaider said of her decision to accept. “I feel like it was definitely a great partnership.”
Paradoxically, playing doubles these days with Williams — among the most decorated players of her generation and, along with sister Serena, half of the second-most-prolific doubles team in history — is both an intimidating notion for a young player and an egalitarian rite of passage, open to just about any current WTA player with a racket and a halfway decent world ranking.
In the four-plus years since Serena famously stepped away from the sport — a decision she would eventually reverse, also famously, this summer — Venus has found it almost impossible to find a full-time doubles partner. Her last seven tournaments have seen her paired with seven different partners, and she only found herself scrambling at the last minute to find a new partner this week because Eala, with whom Williams partnered last month at a tournament in Germany, pulled out in order to focus on her singles matches.
(Williams’s eleventh-hour switch from Eala to Shnaider was described by tournament officials as a “repairing,” which is the sort of beautiful euphemism that would seem to have enormous potential for divorce lawyers.)
Eala’s late scratch extended a brutal streak of rotten luck for Williams in recent doubles competition. In May, American up-and-comer Hailey Baptiste scratched out of their planned French Open pairing with a knee injury. Then, at last month’s Wimbledon, where Serena launched her comeback and where the Williams sisters secured a wild-card entry in doubles, Serena injured her knee during her first-round singles loss to Maya Joint and was forced to withdraw from doubles. Then came Eala’s last-minute decision to withdraw in D.C.
“It’s just unlucky. Time and unforeseen circumstances befall us all,” Williams said. “I would like to hopefully get lucky.”
It’s not as if Williams is an undesirable or unsavory doubles partner. Shnaider’s eagerness to pair with her this week speaks to Williams’ magnetic pull on younger players. So do the words offered this week by Leylah Fernandez, who has played doubles with Williams twice, including at the 2025 U.S. Open.
“It’s tough [playing with Williams], because I knew how competitive she was and how much she loves winning and hates losing. I was stressed, I was nervous,” Fernandez said. “What I didn’t know was [her ability] to calm me down. … Venus definitely has a welcoming aura where she always wants to support and help as much as possible. It motivates me. It encourages me, and it brings me back to why I play tennis.”
On Wednesday evening, at the instant their loss was sealed, Williams and Shnaider met on their side of the net and shared a good, long hug. The adoring crowd, by this point well thinned out, stood and cheered and snapped photos, just in case it might be the last time they see Williams in these parts.
But she doesn’t sound like someone who is ready to bow out. She spoke of her hopes for a delayed reunion with Serena in U.S. Open doubles later this summer, provided Serena is healthy. And despite the chaos of this week — a “repairing,” an unfamiliar partner, a riveting win, a gutting loss — she sounded like someone who wouldn’t want it any other way.
“In tennis, you’re learning something about yourself every day. It just doesn’t end,” Williams said. “It’s such a beautiful and sometimes painful discovery, and I look forward to every day of it.”
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