At six years old, Serena Williams’ daughter Olympia is learning about the special role she played in her mom’s success story.
As any parent will tell you, kids are incredibly perceptive — and as anyone who’s paid the least attention to tennis over the past three decades can tell you, Serena Williams is one of the undisputed GOATs of the sport. So, it was only a matter of time before Williams’ firstborn daughter, six-year-old Alexia Olympia Ohanian, figured out that her mom might be in a league of her own.
“Olympia’s now at an age where she’s like, ‘Listen, I am wondering, why are you so famous? Mommy, how do they know your name?’ I’m like, well…,” Williams said in her cover story for People magazine’s 50th Anniversary issue. “I don’t live in the heart of L.A. or anything, I’m in a more quiet area where I’m very low-key, and I try to do all the normal mom stuff and all the normal life things.”
Nevertheless, Williams is far from a “normal” wife and mother of two. At 42, she’s also a 23-time Grand Slam champion and four-time Olympic gold medalist, and has served as ambassador and campaign star for multiple major brands. In addition to eponymous fashion and jewelry brands and the recently launched Wyn Beauty, she is the founder and CEO of a venture capital firm specializing in female and BIPOC-led businesses.
But humility is clearly Williams’s strongest suit, as evidenced by how she attempted to explain her global renown to her precocious youngster.
“I said, ‘You know how mommy is a little famous?’ [Olympia was] like, ‘No, no, no, you’re really, really, really…’,” Williams recounted. “And I’m just like, ‘Oh my god, no, no, no.’ She was like, ‘No, yes you are. You’re a great tennis player.’”
Of course, Olympia also has the distinction of being part of one of her mother’s greatest moments on the court, as Williams famously won the 2017 Australian Open during her first pregnancy.
