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PARIS — Many Olympic athletes He took to Instagram to share news of his exploits, trials, victories and misfortunes. After her fencing event ended last week, Egypt’s Nada Hafez shared a little more.
It was fencing for two, the athlete revealed – and in fact she had been pregnant for seven months.
“What looks like two players on the podium, there were actually three!” Hafez wrote, under an emotional picture of her during the match. “It was me, my competitor, & my who must come into our world, child! The mother (and the child) finished the competition ranked 16th, the best result of Hafez in three Olympics.
A day later, an Azerbaijani bow was also revealed on Instagram of having competed while she was six and a half months pregnant. Yaylagul Ramazanova said Xinhua News she had felt her child hit before she took a shot – and then she shot a 10, the maximum points.
They have been there Pregnant Olympians and Paralympians first, although the phenomenon is rare for obvious reasons. However, most of the stories have been of athletes competing when they are very early in their pregnancy – or even not far enough along to know they were expecting.
Like the US beach volleyball star Kerri Walsh Jennings, who won her third gold medal while, unknowingly, five weeks pregnant with her third child.
“When I was pulling my body without fear, and going for gold for our country, I was pregnant,” she said on “Today” after the London Games in 2012. She and husband Casey (also a beach player volleyball) had just started. trying to conceive just before the Olympics, he said, calculating that it would take time. But she felt different, and her volleyball partner Misty May-Treanor told her – presciently, it turned out – “You’re probably pregnant.”
It makes sense pregnant athletes they are pushing the limits now, says an expert, as attitudes and knowledge develop about what women can do in the depths of pregnancy.
“This is something we’re seeing more and more,” says Dr. Kathryn Ackerman, a sports medicine physician and co-chair of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s women’s health task force, “as women disapprove of the myth that you can’t exercise at a high level when you’re pregnant.”
Ackerman notes that there has been little data, and so the decisions made on the matter are often arbitrary. But, she says, “doctors now recommend that if an athlete is in good condition to get pregnant, and there are no complications, then it is safe to work, train and compete at a very high level.” An exception, she says, could be something like a ski race, where the risk of a bad fall is great.
But in fencing, says Boston’s Ackerman, there is clearly a protective padding for athletes, and in less physically strenuous sports such as archery or shooting, there is absolutely no reason that a woman can not compete.
It’s not just a physical fitness issue, of course. It is deeply emotional. Deciding if and how to compete while also trying to raise a family is a thorny calculation that Male athletes simply do not need to consider it – at least anywhere near the same way.
Just ask Serena Williams, who won the Australian Open in 2017 while pregnant with her first child. When, about five years later, he wanted to try for a second, he retired from tennis – a heartbreaking decision.
“Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family,” Williams – who won four Olympic golds – wrote in an essay for Vogue. “I don’t think that’s fair. If I were a man, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical work of expanding our family. Maybe I’d be more of a Tom Brady if I had that opportunity .
Williams welcomed Adira River Ohanian in 2023, joining older sister Olympia. And Olympia was the name American softball mother Michele Granger had suggested for the child Granger was carrying when she threw the gold medal winning game in Atlanta in 1996. Her husband suggested the name Athena. Granger preferred neither.
“I didn’t want to make that connection with his name,” Granger said to Gold Country Media in 2011. The child was named Kady.
At the Paris fencing venue at the weekend, fans were torn between admiration for the bravery and determination of Hafez, a 26-year-old former gymnast with a medical degree, and speculation about whether it was risky.
“There are definitely sports that are less violent,” said Pauline Dutertre, 29, sitting outside the elegant Grand Palais during a break in action with her father, Christian. Dutertre had himself competed on the international saber circuit until 2013. “It is, after all, a combat sport.”
“In any case,” he said, “she is courageous. Even without reaching the podium, what she did was brave.”
Marilyne Barbey, attending the fencing from Annecy in south-east France with her family, also wondered about safety, but added: “You can fall anywhere, at any time. And, in the end, it’s the their choice.”
Ramazanova, who was visibly pregnant during the competition, also won admiration, even from her peers. He reached the final 32 in his event.
Casey Kaufhold, an American who won bronze in the mixed team category, he said it was “really cool” to see his Azerbaijani colleague achieve what he did.
“I think it’s great that we’re seeing more expectant mothers shooting in the Olympic Games and it’s great to have one in the sport of archery,” she said in comments to The Associated Press. “He shot very well, and I think it’s really nice because my coach is also a mother and she has done a lot to support her children even when she is away.”
Kaufhold said she hoped Ramazanova’s run would inspire more mothers and mothers-to-be to compete. And he had a more personal thought for the expectant mother:
“I think it’s amazing for this arc that one day, she can say to her child: ‘Hey, I went to the Olympic Games and you were there too.’
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Associated Press reporter Cliff Brunt contributed from Paris.
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For more coverage of the Paris Olympics, visit https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games.
