Serena Williams and daughter Alexis Olympia
are the cover stars for the February 2018 issue of Vogue magazine and
we can’t get over how cute the mother-daughter duo look. They were
photographed by Mario Testino for the new issue.
“I would have eaten that marshmallow,” says
Serena, who, in conspicuous contrast to that image, sips a
radioactive-looking broth, which she nudged her chef to prepare after
reading online that ginger and turmeric were supposed to aid in
breast-milk production.
She positions this tincture on a stack of gold
lamé swatches: Golden Harvest, Gold L’Amour, Golden Daydream, Victorian
Gold. One of these will be selected for the tablecloths at the wedding
dinner. Thinking better of her coaster choice, she shifts her glass to a
stack of photocopied pages from assorted newborn instruction manuals.
Serena loves printing and collating and stacking. She loves paper. She
is the analog to her husband-to-be’s digital.
“Are
you kidding?” Alexis shoots back. “You would never eat that
marshmallow. You would stare down that marshmallow like it was the
enemy. It would be Serena versus the marshmallow.”
“You’re
right,” she admits with a squeak of laughter. “But it would have been
fear. I would have been scared to eat it. I would have been like, Am I
supposed to eat this? Am I going to get in trouble if I eat this?”
Watch Serena Williams Absolutely Tear Up an Airport Runway:
It’s
no secret that a high capacity to delay gratification—to place
discipline and self-sacrifice in the service of a dream that shimmers in
the distance like a mirage—is among the distinguishing characteristics
of the elite athlete. Serena is a special case, of course, an athlete
whose unique gifts fused with years of hard work to produce an avalanche
of victories—more, she swears, than she ever dreamed of as a braided
nine-year-old captured uncomfortably in the pages of her local
newspaper. A more painful vision of reality has also encroached over the
years: the drive-by murder of her older sister Yetunde Price, in 2003; a
slip on a piece of broken glass at a Munich restaurant that led to
pulmonary embolisms, which in turn led to a year on the sidelines (and
then, somehow, after age 30, the five most brilliant seasons of her
career). One gratification she always knew she’d be keeping on the back
burner was motherhood. But on September 1, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr. arrived. Serena calls her Olympia. Alexis prefers Junior.
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