He spent most of this year’s men’s football World Cup in Europe, aligning his diary with the tennis season given the clamour around his wife’s comeback at Wimbledon, although he did attend the final. Two months on, he is sceptical about whether the tournament did enough to reinvigorate the game across the Atlantic. “In the wake of the World Cup, I know Major League Soccer was trying to say: ‘Hey Americans, if you love soccer, we have the best league for soccer.’ It was a tough pitch on the internet, because most football fans are like: ‘No, you’ve got Messi but the best players are not actually playing in the MLS.’ I saw it as a moment, as a Chelsea Women’s owner, as an Athlos owner, how do you take these big events and keep the story going?”
That is the challenge Ohanian is facing with Athlos. By 2028, the year of the LA Olympics, he hopes to have expanded into multiple Athlos meets throughout the athletics season, amplifying athletes’ stories. The end goal is simple: bridge the fandom gap that track and field faces during the four years between Games.
By the end of our conversation, Ohanian, who has daughters Olympia, nine, and Adira, three, with Williams, is keen to clear up one big misconception. “I’m very proud of being a girl dad, but I never want to frame investing in women’s sports as tied to being a girl dad or being married to Serena,” he says, volunteering his wife’s name (questions about being Williams’s husband were off the table).
“It’s a great idea, regardless of who you’re married to and who your children are. I always overemphasise the business mindset of women’s sports because I’ve found that a lot of well intentioned people treat it like a charity and ‘I’m doing something nice for the girls’. That’s hurting the sport. The irony is they desperately want women’s sport to be treated like a business.”
For Ohanian, women’s sport is an unmined market and, in ventures such as Athlos, he is already unearthing jewels.