Serena Williams Is Playing Fed Cup, With Olympics on Her Mind Lynne Sladky/Associated Press Until this season, Serena Williams last played in the Fed Cup in 2007. Her participation this year ensures that she will get to play in the Summer Games in London. The tennis sphere and Twittersphere were brimming with reasonable doubt, but with her next Olympics in the balance, Serena Williams has kept her Fed Cup appointments in 2012. It has hardly been straightforward or, by Williams standards, high profile. The United States is playing for the first time this year in World Group 2, the second division of the women's team competition. The first round was in February against Belarus in Worcester, Mass., the week after the Australian Open, which meant Williams had to play with major jet lag and an ailing ankle. The next round will be on red clay against Ukraine on Saturday and Sunday in Kharkiv, which is Ukraine's second-most populous city but remains well off the beaten path for tennis stars. Result: more jet lag and a whirlwind round trip to Europe before the bigger clay-court challenges to come in Madrid, Rome and then Paris for the French Open. "It was the craziest journey ever, I have to say," Williams, no stranger to superlatives, said in a telephone interview Thursday. To complete the journey, Williams had to catch a red-eye from Miami to Frankfurt, then sprint to her next plane to Kiev, then make the most of the meager 14 minutes she said were available to catch her final flight to Kharkiv, where she finally joined her American teammates and the team captain, Mary Joe Fernandez, early Wednesday evening. "Serena managed to get here somehow, which is awesome," said Sloane Stephens, the 19-year-old American player. Fed Cup is an annual competition, but not for Williams, who, until this season, last played in the event in 2007. The last time before that was 2003; the last time before that was 1999. If you detect a pattern, you are not alone. Olympic eligibility is linked to Fed Cup, with International Tennis Federation guidelines stipulating that players must have participated in or at least made themselves available for Fed Cup in two separate years during each Olympic cycle to be eligible. Williams did not take part in Fed Cup last year because of major health problems, which included pulmonary embolisms that restricted both her play and long-haul travel. But in her effort to make amends and the Olympic minimum, she has been a Fed Cup fixture this year, and she said she shrugged off a case of food poisoning last week to make it to northeastern Ukraine. "Obviously I did want to play last year, so I wouldn't be stuck in a situation where I'm trying to make it last minute to the Olympics, but I just couldn't play, so it is what it is," Williams said. Williams has yet to win the Olympic singles title, but she won the women's doubles in 2000 and 2008 with her older sister Venus, who is also trying to make the 2012 team but declined to make the journey to Ukraine as she continues to manage the effects of an autoimmune disorder. There has been more focus lately on Serena's future mixed doubles partner. She is open to playing three events at the Olympics, which will be held on the familiar grass of the All England Club in London. If she plays mixed doubles, it could be with her close friend Andy Roddick, one of the Bryan twins or John Isner, the new top-ranked American man with the big serve who has been lobbying for the privilege. "I'm just going to have to see what the team wants me to do, but I just think whoever I play with, you just can't go wrong," Williams said. If the United States beats Ukraine, it will return to the eight-team World Group in 2013. The Americans are heavy favorites to do so. The ninth-ranked Williams, a 13-time Grand Slam singles champion who just won the Charleston, S.C., event on clay and in style, is expected to play singles. So is Christina McHale, the 19-year-old from New Jersey who is ranked 36th. Stephens and Liezel Huber, the world's No. 1-ranked doubles player, round out the team. Ukraine's young team includes Lesia Tsurenko, ranked 110th; Elina Svitolina, a 17-year-old who is ranked 171st; and the identical twins Lyudmyla and Nadiya Kichenok, who had never seen Williams in person until Thursday. "Such a star like Serena is not coming to Ukraine every day," Lyudmyla Kichenok said in an e-mail message. It is a great opportunity for Ukrainian people to see one of the best tennis players ever and such a great champion. This is Williams's first visit to Ukraine. "It's very rare that I go somewhere I've never been," she said. That's really cool for me.