Expectant mothers among athletes pushed the boundaries at this year’s Olympic Games in Paris, as new research reveals how far women can go in late pregnancy.
Many Olympic athletes share news of their exploits, trials, victories and heartbreaks on Instagram. After finishing her fencing event last week, Egypt’s Nada Hafez shared a little more.
The athlete revealed that she had been fencing for two years and had actually been pregnant for seven months.
“What looks like two competitors on the podium was actually three!” Hafez wrote under an emotional photo of herself during the match. “It was me, my competitor and my little baby who has not yet arrived in our world!”
The mother (and baby) finished the competition in 16th place, Hafez’s best result in three Olympiads.
A day later, an Azerbaijani archer also revealed on Instagram competing while six and a half months pregnant. Yaylagul Ramazanova told China’s Xinhua News Agency that she felt her baby’s kick before she shot – and then shot a 10, the maximum number of points.
There have been pregnant Olympic and Paralympic athletes before, but it’s rare for obvious reasons. However, most stories involve athletes who compete well before their pregnancy begins, or who weren’t even far enough along to know they were expecting.
Such is the case of American beach volleyball star Kerri Walsh Jennings, who won her third gold medal while unknowingly five weeks pregnant with her third child.
“When I was throwing myself into the air and going for gold for our country, I was pregnant,” she told the “Today” show after the London 2012 Games.
She and her husband Casey (also a beach volleyball player) had only started trying to conceive just before the Olympics, thinking it would take time. But she felt differently, and her volleyball partner, Misty May-Treanor, told her — presciently, it turned out — “You’re probably pregnant.”
“There is no danger in training, doing bodybuilding and participating in high-level competitions”
It makes sense that pregnant athletes are pushing the boundaries today, one expert says, as attitudes and knowledge about what women can do late in their pregnancy are changing.
“It’s something we’re seeing more and more,” said Dr. Kathryn Ackerman, a sports medicine physician and co-chair of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s Women’s Health Task Force.Women debunk the myth that it is not possible to exercise at a high level during pregnancy“.
Ackerman notes that there has been little data and that past decisions on the matter have often been arbitrary. But, she says, “doctors now recommend that if an athlete is in good condition at the beginning of her pregnancy and there are no complications, she can safely train and compete at a very high level“An exception,” she said, “might be a discipline like ski racing, where the risk of a bad fall is high.
But in fencing, says Boston-based Ackerman, athletes are equipped with protective gear, and in less physically demanding sports, like archery or shooting, there’s absolutely no reason why a woman can’t compete.
It’s not just a fitness issue, of course. It’s a deeply emotional one. Deciding whether and how to compete while trying to start a family is a thorny calculus that male athletes simply don’t have to consider, at least not in the same way.
Just ask Serena Williams, who won the Australian Open in 2017 while pregnant with her first child. Five years later, when she wanted to have a second, she retired from tennis — an excruciating decision.
ADVERTISEMENT“Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family,” Williams – who has won four Olympic gold medals – wrote in a Vogue essay. “I don’t think it’s fair. If I were a man, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be playing and winning while my wife did the physical labor of growing our family. Maybe I’d be more of a Tom Brady if I had that option.”
Williams welcomed Adira River Ohanian in 2023, who joined older sister Olympia.
Olympia is the name that the mother of American softball player Michele Granger reportedly suggested for the baby Granger was carrying when she pitched the gold medal game in Atlanta in 1996. Her husband suggested the name Athena. Granger preferred neither.
“I didn’t want to tie it to her name,” Granger told Gold Country Media in 2011. The baby was named Kady.
ADVERTISEMENTSacrifice and courage
The choice to combine motherhood and an athletic career involves many factors, which vary depending on the sport and the country. Franchina Martinez, 24, who practices athletics in the Dominican Republic, explains that in her country, Female athletes are more likely to retire early than male athletes, particularly due to pregnancy.
“When they get pregnant, they think they won’t be able to come back, unlike in more developed countries where they could,” Martinez says. “So they leave the sport, don’t come back to compete or they’re not the same.”
For the sake of her career, she does not plan to have children in the near future: “As long as I can avoid it for the sake of my sport, I will postpone it because I am not ready for it yet.”
At the Paris fencing hall this weekend, fans were torn between admiration for the courage and determination of Hafez, a 26-year-old former gymnast with a medical degree, and speculation about the risks involved.
ADVERTISEMENT“There are certainly less violent sports,” said Pauline Dutertre, 29, sitting outside the elegant Grand Palais during a break alongside her father, Christian. Dutertre competed on the international sabre circuit until 2013. “It’s still a combat sport.”
“In any case,” she notes, “it’s courageous. Even without getting on the podium, what she did is courageous.”
Marilyne Barbey, who attends fencing with her family from Annecy in south-eastern France, also wonders about safety, but adds: “You can fall anywhere, at any time. And, ultimately, it’s your choice.”
Ramazanova, who was visibly pregnant during the competition, also drew admiration, including from her peers. She reached the last 32 places in her event.
ADVERTISEMENTCasey Kaufhold, an American athlete who won bronze in the mixed team category, said it was “really cool” to see her Azerbaijani colleague achieve what she did.
“I think it’s great to see more and more pregnant women shooting at the Olympics and it’s great to have one in the sport of archery,” she said in comments to The Associated Press. “She shot really well, and I think it’s really cool because my coach is also a mother and she does a lot to support her kids even when she’s not there.”
Kaufhold hopes Ramazanova’s race will inspire more mothers and mothers-to-be to compete. And she had a more personal thought for the mom-to-be:
“I think it’s great for this archer to be able to say to her child one day: Hey I went to the Olympics and you were there too“.
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