Pregnancy inequity deeply embedded in the culture of sports

This Monday morning, I chanced upon a podcast featuring Olympian Allyson Felix in which she said:
“One of the scariest moments of my career started on a dark October morning in 2018. I'm a professional athlete, and my training schedule can be a lot - six days a week, five hours a day. Still, I never train that early. But on this day, a special type of fear brought me out at 4am before the sun, a fear that someone might discover a secret I'd been keeping. I was six months pregnant, and I was scared enough to train in the dark so that no one would see the life that was growing inside of me. I feared that if someone posted a photo, my sponsor would immediately change their mind about wanting to work with me. I feared that I would be forced to choose between motherhood and being a competitive athlete.”

It so happened that on the same day, I had picked up a copy of Claire Lynch’s memoir titled Small: On Motherhoods. It is a tender, powerful reflection on motherhood, and on how it feels to push against societal archetypes. Both the podcast and the memoir raised a fundamental question that I, myself have been asking since before I became a mother.

What happens when our identities are at odds with our ambitions? I’m not sure we are ready to admit it but pregnancy-discrimination is deeply embedded in the culture of sports.

Athletes going through the transition to new motherhood face several challenges and often have to make gut wrenching sacrifices. The ‘pressure-cooker’ culture required for success in sports is certainly hard on all athletes, but athlete mums experience the worst of it.

There are plenty of professional male athletes who have continued to play competitively despite becoming fathers. Novak Djokovic, for example, even said that becoming a father was good for his competitive play.

Yet all I hear from the piling list of women who’ve bounced back from motherhood are complains of how hard the industry made it for them to become mothers.

In fact, Serena Williams' main reason for retiring was her desire to expand her family.

Listening to Felix, one gets the sense that pregnancy comes with great emotional and financial pressure for female athletes.

Many sponsors and federations assume that pregnancy means the end of an athlete’s career, so funding is often cut or removed. Additionally, female athletes have to deal with the repercussions of “missing” work because the physical demands of competitive sport do not in any way align with the reality of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum recovery.

Add to that the persisting cultural norms which require a ‘perfect mother’ to be selfless, solely focusing on caring for her children and her family.

Yet in order to compete at her best, an athlete needs to focus on themselves and put their needs first.

It is little wonder, therefore, that many athletes hide their pregnancies for as long as they can. And I know what some might be thinking.

Pregnancy is a choice, right? If a sponsor doesn't want to support an athlete who's not actively winning, that's just part of the deal, right? Well, I think the deal is rigged.

And I think it's time we change the way the sports industry values and supports the parenting journey.

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