An Olympic champion's unwavering advocacy for mothers in sports |

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2022

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Getting pregnant as a track and field athlete is often called the "kiss of death" -- a sign your athletic career will soon end. Olympic champion, entrepreneur and proud mother Allyson Felix thinks it shouldn't be that way. She tells the story of starting a family while fighting to change her former sponsor's maternity policy -- and paving the way for others to get greater protection and more support. Her message is a testament to the power of believing in and advocating for yourself. "You don't have to be an Olympian to create change for yourself and others," she says. "Each of us can bet on ourselves."

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh.
0:07.3	Alison Felix is the most decorated track and field Olympian in history, but she didn't stop there.
0:13.9	The athlete and entrepreneur has spoken out on an injustice that affects all of us.
0:18.8	In her talk from TED 2022, she shares how she found the courage to make
0:22.8	change and invites the rest of us to speak up too. One of the scariest moments of my career
0:31.4	started on a dark October morning in 2018. I'm a professional athlete and my training schedule can be a lot. Six days a
0:41.2	week, five hours a day, it's intense. Still, I never trained that early. But on this day,
0:49.3	a special type of fear brought me out at 4 a.m. before the sun, a fear that someone might discover a
0:56.6	secret I'd been keeping. I was six months pregnant. I was pregnant, and I was scared enough to
1:03.4	train in the dark so that no one would see the life that was growing inside of me. I fear that if a
1:09.7	fan or someone posted a photo, that my sponsor would
1:13.3	immediately change their mind about wanting to work with me. I feared that I would be forced to
1:18.6	choose between motherhood and being a competitive athlete. I feared that the career I worked so hard to
1:26.0	build would disappear just like that.
1:30.2	You think I'm exaggerating, right?
1:33.0	How could a six-time Olympic champion, a 16-time world champion, a world record holder
1:38.2	possibly think that her career might be over by doing something as natural as having a baby.
1:45.6	Well, I'm not exaggerating.
1:48.5	Getting pregnant in track and field has been called the kiss of death,
1:52.4	and it comes with a lot of fear, just like for women in many professions.
1:57.6	I have been watching women that I respect and teammates of mine hide pregnancies since I was 19 years old.
2:05.8	I've seen women have to make gut-wrenching decisions, like deciding whether to recover their health or return to the sport,
	...

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