Babies are Heading to the Olympics
Natalie Achonwa is known for her protective instincts. Achonwa, a three-time Canadian Olympian and a 10-year veteran of the WNBA, was nicknamed “Mama Nat” by her teammates for her willingness to speak up for them on and off the court. In 2020, she was part of the players’ association that negotiated the WNBA’s landmark parental leave policy, which guarantees players fully paid time off. But when she found out she was pregnant with her son, Maverick, almost two years ago, she kept the news mostly to herself. Achonwa played through most of her first trimester—and the 2022 FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup in Sydney, Australia—before telling her teammates. She didn’t want to be a distraction. In the sports world, still, bundles of joy can be seen as a mixed blessing.
Achonwa was back to work within six months of Maverick’s arrival in 2023, with the goal of qualifying for the Paris Games. Getting there, however, wasn’t easy. She experienced postpartum depression, often feeling dissociated from her life. A flood of new hormones upended her usual control over her emotions. Her best friend, former WNBA player Devereaux Peters, drove from Chicago to Achonwa’s home in Indianapolis every weekend to help out with household chores and watch Maverick to give his mom a break.
At one point, Achonwa suffered a repetitive-motion injury—not from training, but from preparing bottles and lifting her baby, a condition colloquially known as “mother’s wrist.” She’d torn her ACL years earlier, but quickly realized that bouncing back from childbirth wasn’t anything like the rehab for that. “Back then, I could hyper-focus on my knee. When I had a baby, it was: I’m exhausted. I’m breastfeeding. Did I eat enough calories to train at elite level and provide milk?” Achonwa says. “I never want to glamorize being a mom and a professional athlete. It’s really, really, really, really hard.”
Achonwa has more than rebounded: this summer, she’ll captain Team Canada’s senior women’s basketball team as they compete for gold in Paris. But her struggle to balance childbirth, recovery, child-rearing and her Olympic responsibilities is anything but rare among her peers. A wave of athlete advocates are pushing to make podium runs, and the profession at large, much more parent-friendly—in the form of nurseries, breastfeeding accommodations and paid leave. The goal? Lighten their load, on and off the playing field.
The world of elite sports, with its hardcore focus on results above all else, has long been at odds with the ever-changing requirements of parenting. But a few social shifts have recently forced the needs of athlete-parents to the forefront—especially moms. Since the 1980s, the careers of high-level female athletes have been getting longer and peaking later thanks to increased participation and investment in women’s sports. During the Tokyo Games, women won three-quarters of Canada’s medals. And ahead of the Games in Paris, the International Olympic Committee introduced a gender-equality campaign that has led, for the first time ever, to an even number of male and female competitors.
Getting to this point has been a long, fraught and occasionally litigious road. In 2017, when Serena Williams paused her career to have her daughter, Olympia, she famously faced a precipitous ranking drop—from number one to number 453. The Women’s Tennis Association subsequently created a rule to help preserve women’s standings when they go on mat leave. Canadian boxer Mandy Bujold faced a similar setback: in 2020, after COVID forced the cancellation of one of her qualifying fights for Tokyo, the IOC used results recorded during her pregnancy and postpartum period to determine whether she’d make the Olympics. Despite being ranked number eight in the world and number two in the Americas pre-partum, Bujold failed to make the cut. She took the IOC to arbitration and won, advancing to the Games.
Also on the road to Tokyo, the Games’s organizing committee and the IOC prohibited family members from travelling with Olympians due to COVID restrictions. For Achonwa’s Team Canada colleague Kim Gaucher, this meant leaving behind her four-month-old daughter, Sophie, for 28 days. After Gaucher appealed to the IOC for an exception, she applied pressure with a desperate, viral Instagram video. “I’m being forced to decide between being a breastfeeding mom or an Olympic athlete. I can’t have both,” she wrote, highlighting the sports world’s stark contrast to the regular working world, where Canadian employers are legally obligated to accommodate. Gaucher’s appeal was eventually granted, which paved the way for other breastfeeding athletes to bring their babies along.
This time around, the IOC has made some strides on inclusivity. Whereas in the past, Olympians had no designated space to be with their children, in Paris, the Olympic plaza will feature a dedicated nursery—sponsored by P&G, the maker of Pampers. Early renderings of the sprawling space show a white and turquoise sanctuary, filled with toys, books and plush furniture, where parents can breastfeed, change diapers and hang out with their kids. The tots will even be given their own official accreditation cards so they can access the room with a caregiver.
Still, some athletes are keen on more than daytime parenting privileges. This past January, Clarisse Agbegnenou, a two-time French gold-medal winner in judo, asked the IOC if her daughter, who was still breastfeeding, could sleep with her in the Village, arguing that having her there would preserve her routine and therefore increase her chances of winning a medal. The IOC turned her down, citing capacity restrictions, along with its need to maintain “an ideal environment for preparation and rest.” (She even asked President Emmanuel Macron to intervene on her behalf.) Eventually, the French Olympic Committee arranged hotel accommodations for her and other French breastfeeding competitors near the Village.
Kim Gaucher hopes that supports like on-site accommodations will soon become the norm. Though she was allowed to bring her daughter along, they were separated once they got to Tokyo: Gaucher bunked with her team in the Olympic Village, while Sophie stayed with her dad in a nearby hotel. Gaucher’s husband would taxi over with the baby for three-hour face-time and breastfeeding visits each day and to pick up the milk that Gaucher had pumped in between events. She remembers bawling the first time she put Sophie in a cab, said goodbye and boarded a bus for gear-fitting with her team. Gaucher feels solidarity with the French athletes, who have made their priorities clear: “This is what I need if you want me to be on the podium.”
Motherhood doesn’t always cramp an athlete’s ability to stay competitive, from a biological standpoint at least. In recent studies, some athlete participants have reported feeling stronger postpartum than they ever had before. A French study from 2021 of 150 elite marathoners showed that 70 per cent of athletes who became mothers posted a personal best after they gave birth. (In 2019, Allyson Felix broke Usain Bolt’s record for most golds won at the World Athletic Championships, 10 months after delivering her daughter via C-section.) More mothers are also competing after having kids, rather than postponing parenthood until after retirement. It’s more apparent than ever that the ceiling on a mom’s ability to medal is cultural rather than physical.
Margie Davenport and Tara-Leigh McHugh, both former athletes and current researchers at the University of Alberta, spent the last five years interviewing dozens of elite North American athletes (including Olympians), along with their coaches and health-care providers, about the challenges of starting a family while competing. They’ve heard it all. The pressure to quickly return to work, from teammates and sponsors, possibly risking injury. Fears about disclosing a pregnancy to a coach, who might see them as a drag on the team. Accusations from online trolls that training while pregnant could kill their baby.
The biggest concerns McHugh and Davenport heard were problems of policy. In Canada, pregnancy and parental leave allocations vary widely between national sporting organizations, or NSOs. Some athletes, like those who play for Hockey Canada or Canada Basketball, receive significant financial support, in addition to being able to apply to receive an injury or illness “card,” or benefits package, from Sport Canada. The card entitles athletes to a monthly stipend of approximately $1,700 to cover their time away from competition. Athletes in smaller sports, like field hockey or wrestling, have to rely primarily on the funding from “getting carded” alone. “To say that pregnancy is the same as an injury,” says McHugh, “that’s so 1900s.”
There has been some progress, however: Sport Canada recently commissioned McHugh and Davenport to make recommendations for how to bring their rules into the 21st century. Their suggestions include educating high-performance athletes on reproductive health, as well as extra money for flights and accommodations when athletes need to bring their babies to training camps and competitions. Their top priority is a universal parental leave policy that’s mandatory for all NSOs. It would include creating a specific benefit category for pregnancy and postpartum, as well as a general parenting card that would provide stipends to parents. If their suggestions are adopted, Canada would have the most advanced set of athlete supports in the world. These changes might even give Canadians a competitive edge. “Athletes perform their best when they’re comfortable,” says Gaucher. “Part of that, for us, is knowing that our families are taken care of.”
On the ground, a group of advocates plan to keep championing the rights of sporty parents. This past February, B.C. rower Jill Moffatt, who will compete in the lightweight women’s double sculls event in Paris, won a $10,000 grant from the Canadian Olympic Committee to fund MOMentum—essentially, an online support group for Olympic parents. (Gaucher and Bujold are among Moffatt’s co-founders.) When it’s live this summer, it’ll offer research on reproductive health, pro bono legal help and grants to help athletes with travel and childcare expenses.
MOMentum’s biggest component will be its peer network, a forum where athletes can bounce questions off colleagues about freezing eggs, for instance, or how to plan for a family between Olympic cycles. “There are so many examples of Canadian athletes being like, ‘I got this medal but my life was a living hell,’ and then other athletes realize, ‘Oh yeah, I’m not the only one,’ ” says Moffatt. “We’re moving away from the traditional macho athletic environment, where it’s just like, ‘Shut up and put up, head down, no distractions, you can’t do anything outside of sport.’ ” Not even raise future medallists.
In the lead-up to Paris, Achonwa has been leaving her house every morning by 6:20 a.m. for a game of five-on-five; sometimes, Maverick tags along. He’ll toddle on the sidelines or grab a ball after the game and (try to) dunk. Achonwa trains for about three hours a day, which she plans around his naps. Some days, he stays with Devereaux Peters or his grandma, who also goes on the road for all of Team Canada’s games.
At just a year old, Maverick has already been to five countries. He was there in Hungary this past February when Achonwa and her teammates qualified for the Olympics. And, thanks to a financial boost from Canada Basketball, which foots travel bills for players’ kids two and under, he’ll be there in France, crashing in an Airbnb with his grandparents. In many ways, Achonwa’s story, which started with significant struggles, is a best-case scenario for what happens when an athlete-parent has a village behind them.
The IOC’s athletes commission has said that they’ll see how this summer’s nursery pilot goes and see what other parental aids they can roll out in the future. Gaucher, who will be coaching Team Canada’s women’s 3 x 3 basketball team, dreams of one day seeing fridges for breast milk storage, along with kid-welcoming policies at all venues. Achonwa, however, won’t play long enough to see them. This summer will mark her fourth and final run at Olympic gold. She briefly considered retiring when she had Maverick, but, hard as it’s been at times, she wanted to show him she could have it all. “I wanted Maverick to see that his mom can be strong, be passionate, be competitive,” she says, “and then to come home, knowing his love was waiting for me.”
This story appears in the August issue of Maclean’s. You can buy the issue here or subscribe to the magazine here.