Every tennis fan knows what went down just about a week ago, when superstar player and world number 1 Serena Williams dropped a bombshell to social media, that she was pregnant.
Most anybody who heard the news were rightly happy for her big news. They were also even more impressed with the living legend than ever before as her online post, later confirmed by a spokesperson, implied that Williams was already with child when she took on the best international tennis players in Melbourne during the 2017 Australian Open in January (where she also won her 23rd Grand Slam title and set a record).
Now news has come out from Serena herself – the first time she spoke publicly about her pregnancy – that her epic “announcement” of her Baby Bump was, in fact, an accident and not at all deliberate.
Big oops
The online post that Serena Williams put up some seven days ago featured her in a bright yellow one-piece swimsuit, snapping a selfie of herself with emphasis on the forming swell of her tummy, and uploaded onto her Snapchat account with the caption “20 weeks” (roughly five months).
The tennis ace said in an interview that she only discovered her pregnancy a couple of days before the start of the Australian Open, and has decided since then to snap a selfie of herself every week as a way to track the visible progress of her baby bump.
Now here’s the kicker: the photos she had been taking and captioning were only meant to be a private record. "I was just saving them [for myself]" she said. Apparently, Serena was aware of the media circus that would erupt once word got out, and thus she had been careful about filing away her preggy selfies.
But, in her own words, that one time she slipped and sent the 20-week pregnancy photo on her Snapchat.
That then explains why the Snapchat pic was deleted not long after it went up (but not fast enough to avoid screen-caps taken by social media hounds). Realizing it was a lost cause, however, Williams had her publicist break the official news.
Super would-be mom
Serena also had to do what, to herself, was a herculean feat of carrying on participation in the Australian Open despite knowing she was with child, saying she and her fans expect her to win whenever she plays and that the news coming out of her pregnancy if she had lost would have been “much bigger”.
The 35-year-old Williams, married to Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, is expected to give birth in fall this year. Meanwhile, she recently has had some strong words regarding curious questions from fellow tennis player and former rank 1 Ilie Nastase regarding the skin hue of her son with her white husband as being both intrusive and racist.
