UPDATE as of 9/13/17: Serena Williams shared a beautiful video of her little girl, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr., in a touching video on social media. Take a look below:
To say Serena Williams is just an tennis player is nothing short than a flat out lie. The 35-year-old phenom is a entrepreneur, trailblazer, history-maker, and honestly the greatest tennis player in history.
With 23 grand-slam wins on the women’s pro tennis tour spanning nearly three decades—from her first, at 17 years old, in September of 1999, to her latest, at 35, in January of 2017, and the most in the open era—Serena is in the heart of every conversation concerning the best athlete of her time.
Despite all of that, Serena is adding another label to her name: mother.
Roughly a week before the beginning of the Australian Open, in Melbourne, last January, after playing poorly in her first match of the year, in which she felt she had missed too many backhands. Serena went and spent two and a half to three hours on the practice court and did roughly the same the next practice day.
But according to her Vanity Fair interview, she felt a little different physically the next day. She had unexpectedly thrown up at one point and her breasts had enlarged. She thought it might be hormonal. But her friend Jessica Steindorff immediately suspected something else and suggested a pregnancy test. So Jessica went to a pharmacy and bought a pregnancy kit.
“I’ll take it just because (a) to prove you wrong and (b) because it’s fun, whatever. It’s like a joke. Why not?”
as Serena was doing her hair and makeup for an event sponsored by the lingerie company Berlei, where she is a spokesperson for its line of sports bras, she took the test in the bathroom. “I put it down. I went back to finishing hair and makeup, was laughing, talking. I was getting the styling done. An hour and a half later, I went back to the bathroom and I totally forgot about it because it was impossible for me. . . . So I went back to get dressed and I went back in the bathroom and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that test.’ ”
Serena, as she put it, “did a double take and my heart dropped. Like literally it dropped.
“Oh my God, this can’t be—I’ve got to play a tournament,” said Serena. “How am I going to play the Australian Open? I had planned on winning Wimbledon this year.”
So what does a woman do when they don’t believe the results of a test? They take it again. Or in Serena’s case, she took it another five times.
Test number 2: Positive. Test number 3: Positive. Test number 4: Positive. Test number 5: Positive. Test number 6: Positive.
Yes, Serena took a total of six total pregnancy tests–all them came back positive. So what happens now?
After telling her fiance, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, via a paper bag with the six positive pregnancy tests it was no time to bask in the glow of impending motherhood. It was back to work for Serena.
The Australian Open was about to begin, and an immediate medical determination had to be made on what risk there might be in playing. The doctor who examined her thought she was about three or four weeks pregnant—it was almost…
… impossible to tell because the fetus was so small—and said there was no risk whatsoever. When Serena returned to the States and had a subsequent exam, it was discovered that she had actually been more advanced, about seven to eight weeks, but she said she still would have played. There were only five people who knew during the tournament: Alexis, Jessica, Jill, Venus, and the doctor. Not even Serena’s coach knew. Nor did tournament officials.
She’d been to this tournament before, but of course this time was different. She was tired more often, feet felt different, not to mention her breasts and her mood. If a match went to three sets she knew she would lose, so she was determined to make every match two sets. Plus, she had to deal with heat–which is heightened during pregnant.
You had to win seven matches to win the tournament.
She won them all in straight sets–pregnant.
Serena was eight-weeks pregnant when she took out the title, but Venus revealed to The Project on Wednesday: ‘She played extremely well, so what could I do?’
The victory during Serena’s first trimester returned her to world No 1 status and also cemented her as the oldest grand slam winner in the open era.
When asked by the panel if she knew her sister was pregnant when she played her, she gave a vague response: “I Uhm… don’t know everything about her, that I can say. I can say that she played extremely well, so what could I do?”
Serena beat her sister Venus 6-4, 6-4 in 82 minutes to secure her record-setting 23rd Grand Slam title, and Venus said: “It was close, but not close enough.”
Serena is now a little more than six months pregnant and showing, which is helping her face the reality that she is having a baby, because “it just doesn’t seem real. I don’t know why. Am I having a baby?”
“If you would have told me last year in October or November that I would have a baby, not be pregnant but have a baby, I would have thought you were the biggest liar in the world. This is kind of how I am right now. This is happening sooner than later, and it’s going by so fast.”
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