Eleven Olympic medals, more than Carl Lewis and Usain Bolt, Allyson Felix, 36, a specialist in the 100m, 200m and 400m, is taking part in his last qualifications for the World Athletics Championships before retiring for good and leading another race. A long-distance race to put the subject of the maternity of sportswomen on the table.
Can you have a career and be a mother? So that no athlete has to ask themselves the question, Allyson Felix has just launched a program with the NGO she co-founded, AndMother, to offer free childcare services to sprinters, throwers weights, high jumpers, long jumpers, or trainers.
“In athleticsshe explains to NPR radio, there has never been anything but silence around motherhood. Either we hide pregnancies to preserve contracts with sponsors, or we end up with suspended contracts as if we were forfeited for injury […] All my life I felt that I had to win all the medals, all the trophies, before I could even imagine starting a family, and I don’t want my daughter to think the same thing.”
Indeed, Allyson Felix personally experienced this taboo in 2018 when, pregnant with her daughter, she saw the atmosphere change, her medical follow-up decrease. Her pregnancy got complicated. She was close to death and gave birth to a premature baby by caesarean section. And the ordeal did not stop there. During her maternity leave, her sponsor, Nike, decides to stop paying her. No competition, no remuneration: “My image was used in advertising campaigns to tell other women that nothing should stop us, and in reality I was in the middle of a showdown myself.“
Allyson Felix therefore fought and now the contracts include post-delivery recovery. With her foundation, she wants to go further, to show that the subject does not stop at pregnancy or maternity leave. “The goal, she concludesis to support all women, to tell them that they do not have to choose between motherhood and the rest.”