He spent most of this year\u2019s men\u2019s football World Cup in Europe, aligning his diary with the tennis season given the clamour around his wife\u2019s 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. \u201cIn the wake of the World Cup, I know Major League Soccer was trying to say: \u2018Hey Americans, if you love soccer, we have the best league for soccer.\u2019 It was a tough pitch on the internet, because most football fans are like: \u2018No, you\u2019ve got Messi but the best players are not actually playing in the MLS.\u2019 I saw it as a moment, as a Chelsea Women\u2019s owner, as an Athlos owner, how do you take these big events and keep the story going?\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019 stories. The end goal is simple: bridge the fandom gap that track and field faces during the four years between Games.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cI\u2019m very proud of being a girl dad, but I never want to frame investing in women\u2019s sports as tied to being a girl dad or being married to Serena,\u201d he says, volunteering his wife\u2019s name (questions about being Williams\u2019s husband were off the table).<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a great idea, regardless of who you\u2019re married to and who your children are. I always overemphasise the business mindset of women\u2019s sports because I\u2019ve found that a lot of well intentioned people treat it like a charity and \u2018I\u2019m doing something nice for the girls\u2019. That\u2019s hurting the sport. The irony is they desperately want women\u2019s sport to be treated like a business.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Ohanian, women\u2019s sport is an unmined market and, in ventures such as Athlos, he is already unearthing jewels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He spent most of this year\u2019s men\u2019s football World Cup in Europe, aligning his diary with the tennis…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":854314,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[4818,360793,399,6542,1079,99,615,428,141692],"class_list":["post-854313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-athletics","tag-chelsea-women","tag-football","tag-serena-williams","tag-sport","tag-sports","tag-standard","tag-tennis","tag-womens-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=854313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/854314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=854313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=854313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=854313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}