How Allyson Felix’s Olympic Village Nursery Opens the Doors to Moms in Sports
Decorated track and field athlete Allyson Felix wins the hearts of moms everywhere with the first-ever nursery at the Olympic Village.
Training for the Olympics is often described as intense — there’s no time for anything person and rarely, a few minutes for family. But with Allyson Felix opening the first-ever nursery at the Olympic Village, it shines a beacon of hope for moms. Athletic moms who feel that they needed to sacrifice their dreams to compete in the name of motherhood now have a door to be both a mom and the superhuman that everyone celebrates them as.
“Pregnancy and motherhood don’t have to mean a career end for female athletes,” reveals Emma Terho, the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s Athletes’ Comission Chair and a two-time Olympic ice hockey medalist for Finland. “This nursery allows that to happen, while also giving athletes the opportunity to focus on the Games.”
A sense of normalcy
Allyson Felix is no stranger to how heated the competition can get in the Olympics, citing the nursery as a place of “normalcy” in an interview with NBC Olympics.
“It’s childcare.” she explains. “It’s here so that mothers and families feel supported. Having some normalcy is great, just to have an actual space dedicated for this.”
A mother herself who had the life-threatening pregnancy condition pre-eclampsia, Allyson Felix shared both the rewarding and harrowing moments of motherhood. From returning to competition to bringing her daughter around while competing, Allyson admitted to struggling to balance it all.
“It was even hard in ways I didn’t expect, like staying in hotels, washing bottles, all the things you have to bring, feeding your baby in stadiums, who’s going to watch your baby. It was challenging, but I had a lot of learnings of how things can be better,” she admits.
But with her eldest, now 5-year-old Camryn, being born a preemie but now living happily and healthily, Allyson looks forward to supporting families who went through the same situation.
Motherhood should not be the end of a mother’s dreams
The bittersweetness in motherhood isn’t always because of the parenting wins and losses. There’s grieving too; of the woman we could’ve been, had we not chosen motherhood. Back in the day, mothers had to champion the household. Anything else was either too unaccommodating or too much for any woman to handle on her own. And in a lot of cases, the specific support they needed wasn’t there.
But with competitions as grand as the Paris Olympics 2024 becoming more open to moms, the doors are once again open for the women who chose motherhood and placed their dreams of becoming global athletes on the back burner.
Allyson Felix and her husband, Kenneth Ferguson, also welcomed their second baby — a boy — named Kenneth Maurice Ferguson III (affectionately nicknamed Trey) last April 10.
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