Serena Williams says winning the Australian Open while pregnant was her most important career moment: 'I don't know how I did that'

CNBC

2 days ago

BERLIN — It was an impressive enough sporting feat when Serena Williams won a record 23rd Grand Slam singles title at the 2017 Australian Open, beating her sister Venus in the final. Soon after came a revelation: she had been pregnant at the time.
"I don't know how I did that, honestly," Williams said at an event Wednesday, selecting the moment as the most important of her tennis career.
It's been quite the career — after winning her first Grand Slam at the U.S. Open in 1999, Williams went on to become the only player to have achieved the "Golden Slam" — winning the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon and US Open and getting an Olympic gold medal — in both singles and doubles tennis.
"I don't know what I was doing then, I was nine weeks pregnant ... I do remember not being able to run for a long time," Williams said at the SuperReturn private equity conference in Berlin.
"I didn't tell anyone. I mean, Venus knew, and I still feel really bad about that, because a deep part of me feels like because we played each other in the final, I'm like, she must have known, and she must have felt some sort of deep heaviness to go even further and go all out. But she was only one of two people that knew."
Early pregnancy symptoms can be intense as the body undergoes a huge transformation, with a surge in hormones often leading to fatigue, breathlessness and nausea.
"I remember saying, I have to do a lot of aces, I have to do a lot of winners," Williams continued, referring to a point scored directly from a serve. "I can only play, like, four balls and I'm done."
"I remember one time playing a long point against one player, and I couldn't breathe. And I'm like, How does she not see that I'm not able to breathe right now, and so I just intentionally lost the next point just to kind of try and get my energy back. But then I was like: Why am I playing this far pregnant? This is nuts."
Williams, who has two daughters with investor and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, stepped back from professional tennis in 2022 to focus on her family.
Sports stars such as cyclist Laura Kenny have spoken in recent years about the challenges of balancing an intense and physically demanding career with a desire to get pregnant, while tennis player Naomi Osaka has criticized public commentary that one must be sacrificed for the other.
Williams now runs venture capital fund Serena Ventures, which has 40 portfolio companies.
She told the packed audience of private equity professionals that the qualities that made her obsessed with winning in sports translated to a single-minded focus as an investor.
"I do remember at one point, walking on the court at Wimbledon, and my partner at the time called me about a deal that we were trying to close," she recalled.
"I was on Court One that day, and it's a really long walk. And I remember talking to her on the phone, and in the conversation, she's like ... How's your day going? I'm like: Well, I'm walking on the court right now. And she's just like: Are you kidding me? You have to get off the phone. I'm like, okay, it's fine. It's a long walk. I've done it before. So that's how intense, how intentional I am," Williams said.
She noted that she looks for founders who are obsessive about being the best at what they do and changing the lives of people they want to impact.
Her earliest investment was in the American football team Miami Dolphins in 2009, when she was the world's top-ranked female player.
"We got so many bad articles about why we shouldn't be doing this. We need to just focus on tennis, and we need to not think about this," she said of the reaction from the media and sporting world at the time.
"Now as an athlete, we're at the point where if you're only doing basketball or if you're only doing football, if you're only doing tennis, it's like, well, what else are you doing? So we gave people that platform to be like, it's okay. You can also be an entrepreneur, and you can do sport. You don't have to just stay in one lane, you know, and just do one thing."