NEW YORK: Venus Williams moved on and Marat Safin said goodbye at the US Open on Wednesday.

Her left knee heavily wrapped, the third-seeded Williams defeated fellow American Bethanie Mattek-Sands 6-4, 6-2 in a much easier match than she had two nights before when she fell behind a set before rallying against Russian Vera Dushevina.

She hurt the knee in the opener, but if she was still in pain in the second round, her opponent couldn’t tell.

“She was moving like a cat,” Mattek-Sands said.

While Williams advanced to the third round, Safin’s Grand Slam career was over.

Planning to retire at season’s end, the former world No. 1 fell 1-6, 6-4, 6-3, 6-4 to Jurgen Melzer of Austria.

Safin’s career will end with two Grand Slam titles, a smaller number than many experts thought possible when he broke through by beating Pete Sampras in the 2000 US Open final.

“That match was a miracle for me,” Safin said. “It took some time for me to see how big this thing was. It was difficult because I was also 20 years old, I wasn’t ready for this. It was difficult to understand it.” Now he’s 29 and wants to move to the next chapter of his career, though he concedes he’s not sure what, exactly, that will be. Watching his top-ranked sister, Dinara Safina, probably won’t be a big part of it.

“I really love my sister, but I think she can manage without me,” he said.

He leaves behind a lot of good memories. He was a fiery, emotional player in a sport that doesn’t have many — a player who estimated has broken more than 300 rackets in his career and also got fined for pulling his pants down once during a French Open match.

Will he miss tennis as much as tennis misses him? “I need to get away from tennis for some time to realize what I’ll miss,” he said. “Right now, it’s difficult to decide exactly what I’ll miss.” Also exiting was two-time major champion Amelie Mauresmo, who fell 6-4, 6-0 to Aleksandra Wozniak of Canada.

Mauresmo recently turned 30 and is also thinking about retirement, though she won’t commit to a decision.

“The thing I don’t want to do is make the decision to stop and then after two, six, eight months think, it was not quite the time yet,” Mauresmo said. “Because then it’s too hard, I would say, probably to make a comeback as Kim is making now, given the age.”

Kim Clijsters, who came back to the US Open after a long break with an easy win Monday, had a second-round match on Wednesday against 14th-seeded Marion Bartoli of France. Other seeded winners from early action were men’s No. 13 Gael Monfils and No. 24 Juan Carlos Ferrero, and women’s No. 7 Vera Zvonareva, No. 18 Li Na and No. 31 Elena Vesnina. No. 10 Flavia Pennetta also won 6-0, 6-0 over Sania Mirza — the first double-bagel of this year’s tournament.

On Tuesday night, former champion Maria Sharapova returned to Flushing Meadows with an impressive 6-3, 6-0 victory over Tsvetana Pironkova of Bulgaria.

Several hours after her Russian compatriot Dinara Safina went perilously close to becoming the first No. 1-seeded woman to lose in the first round of the Open, 2006 champion Sharapova gave a much stronger performance.

The three-time Grand Slam titlist produced 29 winners — 23 more than her 98th-ranked opponent.

Sharapova showed no signs of the shoulder tear that forced her to have surgery in October and kept her off the tour for nearly 10 months.

In addition to the tennis skills and grit that once took her to No. 1 in the rankings, Sharapova always has placed an emphasis on fashion. On this night, her black dress carried bold, metallic accents, paired with a matching, ‘60s-style silver headband to create an outfit she described as a tribute to New York’s skyline.

Former No. 1 Ana Ivanovic, seeded 11th, was bundled out in the first round by 52nd-ranked Kateryna Bondarenko of Ukraine 2-6, 6-3, 7-6 (7).

Nearly undone by 11 double-faults and 48 total unforced errors, Safina was a point away from a 4-0 deficit in the third set before coming back to beat Olivia Rogowska of Australia 6-7 (5), 6-2, 6-4.

In other upset results: 276th-ranked Jesse Witten of the United States downed No. 29-seeded Igor Andreev 6-4, 6-0, 6-2 on the men’s side; Yanina Wickmayer of Belgium defeated No. 16 Virginie Razzano of France 6-4, 6-3; and Shahar Peer of Israel eliminated No. 32 Agnes Szavay of Hungary 6-2, 6-2.