Breastfeeding was magical but my (male) coach made me stop to save my career, says Serena
HER decision to stop breastfeeding so that she could resume her reign on court brought her to tears.
And now Serena Williams has revealed that her coach was the one who convinced her to make that sacrifice.
Patrick Mouratoglou told the tennis champion to stop breastfeeding her daughter Alexis Olympia at eight months in May after her struggle to lose weight.
‘It’s absolutely hard to take from a guy’, she told Time magazine. ‘He’s not a woman, he doesn’t understand that connection, that the best time of the day for me was when I tried to feed her.’
She said she enjoyed breastfeeding so much because it was a ‘magical superpower’ to make her daughter happy and calm. However, Miss Williams has previously
‘It was hard to take from a guy’
spoken about how hard she found it to return to form while breastfeeding.
The US documentary series Being Serena revealed she weighed 14.6 stone in April 2018, 3.5 stone more than her usual weight. In the programme, her coach said: ‘It’s all about getting the results that we want, and the results we want is that you play and you win.
‘So the question is how to do that. The first thing is: stop breastfeeding. Because the problem is you’re too heavy.
‘You are stocking a lot of fat. To practise feeling super heavy, the effort is a joke. It’s too difficult.’
Miss Williams, 36, gave birth to her daughter in September. She has been facing the challenge of balancing motherhood with her demanding training regime. Last week she said she didn’t feel like a good mother because of fears she was not doing enough for her daughter. She also said she had cried after missing her first steps during training.
In July, the 23-time Grand Slam winner suffered the worst loss of her 20-year professional career in a match that lasted just 51 minutes.
She lost 6-1, 6-0 to Britain’s Johanna Konta at the Silicon Valley Classic tournament in California. Never before in 928 career matches had the star won just a single game. Of her return to Wimbledon this year, she said: ‘I dedicated that to all the mums out there who’ve been through a lot. Some days, I cry. I’m really sad.
‘I’ve had meltdowns. It’s been a really tough 11 months. If I can do it, you guys can do it too.’
She added: ‘I still have to learn a balance of being there for her, and being there for me. I’m working on it.
‘I never understood women before, when they put themselves in second or third place. And it’s so easy to do. It’s so easy to do.’
The tennis star, who married Silicon Valley millionaire Alexis Ohanian in 2017, said in July that exercise and a careful diet had not helped her to lose weight while breastfeeding.
‘I was vegan, I didn’t eat sugar,’ she said. ‘And I wasn’t at the weight I would’ve been had I not breastfed. For my body, it didn’t work.’
After she stopped breastfeeding, she said she dropped ten pounds in a week – but the experience was difficult. ‘I literally sat Olympia in my arms and I talked to her and we prayed about it,’ she said. ‘And I told her, “Look, I’m gonna stop. Mommy has to do this.” I cried a little bit – not as much as I thought I would. And she was fine.’