Tennis player Serena Williams has announced her retirement. Williams is getting prepared to end her career after the 2022 U.S. Open. In a recent interview with Vogue, the professional athlete gave her greatest performance as the cover girl for the magazine's September 2022 issue while discussing how she is at a crossroads with her career and her family.
"Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family. I don’t think it’s fair. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labour of expanding our family." She continued, "Don’t get me wrong: I love being a woman, and I loved every second of being pregnant with Olympia…. A lot of people don’t realize that I was two months pregnant when I won the Australian Open in 2017. But I’m turning 41 this month [on September 26], and something’s got to give," Williams spoke to the magazine per ET Canada.
Williams said she "never liked the word'retirement'" and would prefer to refer to her leaving the sport as an"evolution." I'm here to let you know that I'm moving away from tennis and toward other things that are significant to me, she said. I discreetly founded Serena Ventures, a venture investing business, a few years ago. I soon afterward began a family. I want to enlarge that family," she said, admitting that she and her husband Alexis, with whom she shares a daughter who is four years old, had been trying to conceive.
Williams noted: "There is no happiness in this topic for me…. I feel a great deal of pain. It’s the hardest thing that I could ever imagine. I hate it. I hate that I have to be at this crossroads. I’m torn: I don’t want it to be over, but at the same time I’m ready for what’s next."
