Serena and Venus Williams take the court together tonight at the Cincinnati Open, and if you want to watch it from Costa Rica, you have two realistic options.The match starts at 5 p.m. Costa Rica time on Grandstand Court. That is 7 p.m. on the U.S. East Coast, where the tournament is played. Doubles matches follow whatever is scheduled ahead of them, so treat that as the earliest possible start rather than a guarantee. If the preceding match runs long, yours starts late.
Your first option is Disney+ on the Premium plan, which carries every match from the tournament in this region. Your second is ESPN, which picks up selected matches across its channels. Disney+ is the safer choice tonight. ESPN chooses which matches to televise, and a first-round doubles match is exactly the kind of thing that gets passed over for singles — even one with two of the most famous players in the sport’s history in it.
Skip TennisTV. It is a common recommendation in tournament guides and it will not work for this match. TennisTV only carries men’s matches, and this is a WTA event. You would be paying for a subscription that cannot show you the thing you subscribed for.
The sisters have not played doubles together since the 2022 U.S. Open in New York. They have won 14 major doubles titles and three Olympic gold medals as a team. They were supposed to reunite at Wimbledon earlier this summer, but Serena hurt her knee in a first-round singles loss and both withdrew from the doubles draw. Cincinnati is the reunion that Wimbledon did not get.
Neither arrives in form. Venus, 46, lost her opening singles match here on Friday in straight sets to Colombia’s Emiliana Arango. Serena, 44, did not enter the singles draw at all. She has played doubles twice since returning this year, at Queen’s Club with Victoria Mboko and in Berlin with KarolÃna Muchová.
Their opponents are not a sentimental draw. Kostyuk is a seeded player at this tournament and a fixture in the top tier of the women’s game. Stearns grew up in Cincinnati and reached the doubles quarterfinals here last year. Both received a wild card, same as the Williams sisters, which is how two wild-card teams ended up facing each other in the opening round.
The tournament runs through Aug. 23, when both singles finals are played. Cincinnati is the last significant tune-up before the U.S. Open, which begins Aug. 30 in New York — and where Venus is entered in mixed doubles. Novak Djokovic has already gone out here, losing in the heat on Saturday and saying afterward that he was unsure whether he would return to the tournament again.
If you miss the live window tonight, Disney+ carries replays. Highlights usually surface within a few hours on the tournament’s own channels, though a full-match replay is the only way to see a doubles match in any real detail. Broadcasters rarely cut extended highlight packages for them.
