“Olympia’s doing good,” said Serena Williams during an appearance on Person to Person with Norah Donnell. While discussing life after tennis, Norah Donnell asked Serena, 41, about her and Alexis Ohanian‘s child and if she will follow in her mother’s footsteps. Sadly, it doesn’t seem that way. “She doesn’t actually like to play tennis too much,” admitted Serena. “That’s a little disappointing for me, but she’s actually really good at it. So we are trying to figure out a way to get her to play a little bit.”
The conversation turned to the social aspect of sports – how certain people need a playmate in order to get into the game (like how Serena had her sister, Venus Williams). “Olympia loves being social,” said Serena. “It’s interesting because, growing up playing tennis I don’t think I loved being social, but looking back, I was always with my sister, so obviously, it was super social. That makes sense that girls like to have that social sport, and it’s a social aspect of that. I think it’s actually super, super important. She loves being around friends. She loves going to school.”
With that, Serena seemed determined not to let Olympia’s natural talent go to waste. “Maybe I can push her into tennis by getting other kids to have a group lesson,” she hypothesized with Norah (h/t Entertainment Tonight). “I think that’s what I’m going to do. You just gave me a nice clue because I really want her to play at least a little bit because she’s actually really good at it.”
Olympia may not have a taste for tennis like her mother, but she certainly shares Serena’s fashion sense. At the start of February, Serena shared a video of her daughter in the multicolored feathered gown that the tennis icon wore to the 2021 Met Gala.
Serena walked away from tennis following her run at the 2022 US Open. Days afterward, she appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon to playfully hint that she might not be completely done with the sport. “You know what? Tom Brady started an amazing trend. That’s what I want to say,” she joked.
“I have never liked the word retirement,” Serena wrote in the Vogue essay confirming her departure from the sport. “It doesn’t feel like a modern word to me. I’ve been thinking of this as a transition, but I want to be sensitive about how I use that word, which means something very specific and important to a community of people.”