Champion mums
So you’re the greatest tennis player in history? Have a baby and then have another go.
Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in high heels. Serena Williams has done everything Roger Federer has done (actually more: she has 23 grand slam singles titles to his 20) and had a baby in the process.
Now 36, the two greatest players of their time, perhaps of all time, have been at Wimbledon aiming to show that age is no barrier to extending their staggering records. Federer has two sets of twins, but fatherhood doesn’t affect an athlete’s primary resource – the body – like giving birth, which Williams did last September. “There have been so many days, even still, when I’m like, ‘How am I going to keep going?’” she said on her return to competition in May. “It’s been really, really difficult.”
Williams can draw inspiration from the likes of English runner Paula Radcliffe, who won the 2007 New York marathon 10 months after giving birth, and Scottish golfer Catriona Matthew, who won the British Open 11 weeks after having her second daughter. In tennis, there’s the precedent of Belgian Kim Clijsters, who won the 2009 US Open on her return from a two-year retirement and a year after having a child.
Whatever Williams does from here on probably won’t get the recognition it deserves.
The International Tennis Hall of Fame entry for Dorothea Lambert Chambers, who won seven Wimbledon titles and a gold medal at the
1908 Olympics, doesn’t mention the fact that she was also a mother.