Serena Williams announces planned retirement

Serena Williams, the 23-time Grand Slam tennis champion and one of the most iconic figures in modern sports, is planning her retirement.

In her Vogue cover story Tuesday, Williams announced that she is planning to step away from tennis after participating in the U.S. Open in New York later this summer. Though she doesn’t call it a “retirement” from tennis, she is moving on to focus on her family and other business ventures.

“I have never liked the word retirement,” she wrote for Vogue. “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. Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to is evolution. I’m here to tell you that I’m evolving away from tennis, toward other things that are important to me. A few years ago I quietly started Serena Ventures, a venture capital firm. Soon after that, I started a family. I want to grow that family.”

Williams’ last Grand Slam victory came at the Australia Open in 2017, where she was two months pregnant with her daughter Olympia. She says she and husband Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, have been trying to have another baby.

“In the last year, Alexis and I have been trying to have another child, and we recently got some information from my doctor that put my mind at ease and made me feel that whenever we’re ready, we can add to our family,” she wrote. “I definitely don’t want to be pregnant again as an athlete. I need to be two feet into tennis or two feet out.”