Serena Williams criticized a luxury hotel in Paris on Monday evening for being “denied access” to the hotel’s rooftop restaurant along with her children. The retired tennis champion, who served as a torch bearer at the opening ceremony of this summer’s Olympics, shared an anecdote about her experience at the Peninsula Paris on X, formerly known as Twitter.
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“Yikes @peninsulaparis I’ve been denied access to rooftop to eat in a empty restaurant of nicer places … but never with my kids,” Williams wrote. “Always a first.” She added on a hashtag for the Olympics.
A staffer at the Peninsula’s rooftop restaurant, Maxime Mannevy, told Variety that Williams showed up to the premises with another woman and a stroller and looked “unrecognizable.”
“When she came there were only two tables available and they had been reserved by clients of the hotel,” said Mannevy, who shares that she was not working when Williams visited the restaurant. “My colleague didn’t recognize her and feels terrible, but he told her what he would have told any other client, which is to wait downstairs in the bar for a table to become available. That was absolutely nothing personal.”
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Representatives for Williams were not immediately available for comment.
Williams first arrived in the French capital in late July, ahead of the Olympic opening ceremony in which she participated as a torch bearer. The champion, who retired from professional tennis after the 2022 U.S. Open, was one of several athletes to carry the torch, with others including nine-time medallist Carl Lewis, French favorites Zinedine Zidane, Teddy Riner and Marie-José Pérec, as well as Tony Parker and fellow tennis champ Rafael Nadal. She has remained in Paris to take in the Olympics, making appearances at several tennis matches over the past few weeks, including at Novak Djokovic’s win over Carlos Alcaraz to take home gold in the men’s singles tournament.
Williams won four Olympic gold medals over the course of her career. One came in the women’s singles at the London games in 2012, while the other three were earned in the women’s doubles, in which Williams and her sister, Venus Williams, emerged victorious in Sydney 2000, Beijing 2008 and London 2012.
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