When Allyson Felix won her final gold Olympic medal, at Tokyo 2020, it made her the most decorated US track and field athlete of all time. Eleven medals – seven of which were gold – over five consecutive Games. But that final gold, in the women’s 4x400m relay at the postponed Games, held in 2021, was all the more impressive given what Felix had been through since the previous Olympics. Just two years before, she had nearly died in childbirth, and now she felt she had a duty to tell the world about it.
“Although my mindset was completely dialled in to the task at hand,” she says, “I also knew that I was running for a bigger purpose.”
Felix had been 32 weeks pregnant when she was diagnosed with severe pre-eclampsia – a complication of pregnancy that causes high blood pressure – at a routine prenatal appointment. She was taken to hospital for an emergency caesarean. Her daughter, Camryn, was born weighing just over 2kg (4lb 8oz) and was in a neonatal intensive care unit for a month. “I was unsure if I was going to make it. If I was ever going to hold my precious daughter,” she later wrote.
“I think that being an Olympic athlete I took my health for granted,” Felix says today. “Even throughout my pregnancy.” It was only at 32 weeks, when “everything went south” that Felix realised how much at risk she was. Pre-eclampsia is 60% more common among Black women than among white women in the US – and rates for Black women are increasing, according to the Black Women’s Health Study. And yet, Felix says, she was never warned about the dangers until it was too late. “You just don’t imagine these complications happening to a top athlete,” she says. But she realised that her story was “not unique or rare. So many women of colour have a similar story and I really wanted to be part of a solution.”
She did not find it easy to speak out. “At the beginning, I was really unsure,” she says. “I wasn’t comfortable with sharing something so personal. But when I started to think about women who were affected, Black women, it made me understand that I needed to be vulnerable. Because going through that really changed me.”
In May 2019, she testified in front of a House of Representatives ways and means committee on maternal health and mortality, about what she described as the “most terrifying two days of my life”. She had noticed that her feet were swelling – a common symptom of pre-eclampsia – but she had never been told to look out for it. In her powerful testimony, she said doctors needed to start taking the health of Black women seriously in pregnancy.
“It was so out of my comfort zone,” she says. “But I knew that testifying would bring more attention to the issue.”
In April 2023, Felix was rocked by the news that her teammate and friend Tori Bowie, with whom she had won a gold Olympic medal in the 4x100m relay at Rio 2016, had died after going into early labour. In 2021, another member of that team, Tianna Bartoletta, nearly died in childbirth after going into labour at 26 weeks.
Bowie’s death was “devastating”, Felix says. “Thinking back to all of the relays we’d been in together, competing side by side. And to realise that she had these severe complications, in this day and age? It’s just tragic.”
It prompted Felix to write a blistering piece for Time magazine that said her friend must not “die in vain”. In the US, Black women are two-and-a-half times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause as their white counterparts. In the UK, Black women are four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. “We’re dealing with a Black Maternal Health crisis,” Felix wrote. “Here you have three Olympic champions, and we’re still at risk … I would love to have another child. That’s something that I know for sure. But will I be here to raise that child? That’s a very real concern. And that’s a terrifying thing.”
* * *
Felix, 38, was born in 1985 in Los Angeles; her father was an ordained minister and her mother worked as an elementary school teacher. Her older brother and now agent, Wes Felix, was also a sprinter specialising in the 100m and 200m at a national level. Felix herself tried out for her school track team at 13 before going on to win dozens of titles on a regional and national level. Her talent, evident from a young age, is something she has consistently attributed to her Christianity. “My faith has always been the foundation, and it’s the reason that I ran,” Felix says. “I felt like I was blessed with this gift, and I always wanted to use it to the best of my ability.”
She made her first Olympic appearance at 18, at the 2004 Games in Athens. She describes the whole experience as “just overwhelming”. The previous year had been a successful one: she had finished second in the 200m sprint at the 2003 US national championships, and reached the quarter-finals of the athletics world championships in the same event in Paris that year. Her Olympic approach was not about “mindset” she says. “I was just there to compete.” She won a silver medal in the 200m sprint.
In 2007, she beat the woman she came second to in Athens, Jamaica’s Veronica Campbell-Brown, when she broke the 22-second barrier for the first time in her career in the 200m at the world championships in Osaka.
“There are the moments that you have that pay off, and it feels great and you have a breakthrough,” Felix says. “Breaking 22 seconds felt like a long time coming, as in my mind I thought it would have happened more quickly. It was years before it did happen, but when it did it was such a joyous and rewarding feeling.” After that race, she said her next goal was a gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
But it was not to be. Just a year later, she experienced her first crushing low when Campbell-Brown took the 200m sprint gold medal in Beijing. “For me, 2008 was just devastation,” she says. “As an elite athlete, all you train for is that gold medal. I was also the favourite and there was a lot expected of me and I expected a lot for myself. To fall short of that was really difficult. At that time in my life, I didn’t have the tools to figure out how to move forward. And so I definitely had a difficult time processing that.”
Despite the fact that she won three gold medals in the London 2012 Games – the 200m sprint, as part of the 4x100m relay team (where the US team broke the world record by half a second) and in the 4x400m relay, her favourite ever Olympic moment is something she thinks “no one would probably know about”. It was the moment she competed in the 100m sprint at the London Games.
“That has always been such a challenging event, and I’m not a 100m runner,” Felix says. “So to go to the Olympics and compete there in the final was such a huge personal achievement.” She ultimately came fifth.
In 2018, Felix married her partner, the sprinter and hurdler Kenneth Ferguson. She began to think about starting a family – something that is often seen as a career-ender for female athletes. She had pushed back thinking about pregnancy for as long as possible.
“It was kind of an unspoken thing among Olympic athletes, especially in track and field, that if you’re going to have a baby or get married or anything major, it needs to happen in what is known as an ‘off’ year – when there are no imminent competitions. That’s seen as your opportunity,” she says.
“Waiting a long time,” she says, meant she had seen athlete friends go through difficult times managing their career expectations with the pressures of motherhood. Not only this, but there was an unspoken rule that if a female athlete got pregnant, her sponsorship income from big brands would be slashed. “I always felt like, well, maybe if I accomplish enough, then that won’t be my experience,” she says. “I think that’s really what pushed me to wait till the latter points of my career. But in the end, I ended up in the same fight.”
Felix had been sponsored by Nike for almost a decade until November 2017, when her contract with the sportswear company ended and she began to renegotiate it. The company came back with a 70% pay cut. “That was before they knew I was pregnant,” she says – and despite her being one of the world’s most decorated athletes, with six gold Olympic medals under her belt.
Knowing that she wanted to start a family, Felix had asked Nike to guarantee that she wouldn’t be financially penalised if she didn’t perform at her best during and after any potential pregnancy. The company refused. “It went downhill from there,” she says. “I think this amplified my fear, because I had seen teammates really struggle through motherhood and not be supported, and that to me was devastating.
“I felt like from a marketing perspective, Nike always told these stories about supporting women,” she says. To be going through something that seemed to contradict that “was really disheartening”, she says. “And I was disappointed, because I didn’t want to leave the company. I never intended to do that.”
Having her daughter, she says “really shifted everything for me”. She felt pressure to return to work and perform as before, despite the trauma of the birth. “And I realised, there’s no way I’m going to let her generation deal with these same issues.”
Felix, frustrated, went public. In an op-ed for the New York Times, she wrote: “I asked Nike to contractually guarantee that I wouldn’t be punished if I didn’t perform at my best in the months surrounding childbirth. I wanted to set a new standard. If I, one of Nike’s most widely marketed athletes, couldn’t secure these protections, who could?”
Her public protest, alongside fellow Nike athletes Alysia Montaño and Kara Goucher, who had been through similar issues during and after pregnancy, caused widespread outcry and a congressional inquiry. Nike agreed to change its terms and announced a new athlete maternity policy that guaranteed pay and bonuses for 18 months around a pregnancy.
For Felix, Nike’s change of policy was bittersweet. On one hand, it was “incredible”, because she and the other athletes affected by the policy “had achieved what we were fighting for”. “But it took coming out publicly, and ultimately leaving the company,” she says, for that to happen. “I had to focus on the fact that when you’re trying to change something for the better, you’re often not the recipient of it.”
For now, Felix is excited to be going to the Olympics yet again, this time as a spectator. “I’m looking forward to not having the intensity and the pressures and everything that comes along with competing,” she says. “I’ll also have my family with me, and I’m excited to really experience it from a different side.” That family now includes her second child, a son born in April.
Ultimately, Felix doesn’t feel as if she has retired. “I’ve just pivoted to something else,” Felix says. “I’m retired from competing professionally, but I feel like I’m just in the next phase of my life. I feel busier than ever; I’m doing work that I feel really moved by and engaged with.”
Part of this work is running her own footwear company, Saysh. Retirement has also allowed Felix to dedicate time to her family and friends, something that she struggled with during her career. “I love the small moments, I think because much of my career has centred on travelling for extended periods. For a lot of my athletic career I missed so many moments: I wasn’t present at funerals and at weddings and major life transitions for people. Now, although I’m still travelling, I’m able to be around for those really big life moments.”
She still sometimes thinks about the career she almost had. “I never grew up wanting to be an Olympic athlete, or even an athlete at all,” she says. “I wanted to be a teacher, and sometimes I think that it would have been a much simpler life. I’ve never been one to really crave the limelight or to enjoy those things.
“But then I look at the opportunities I’ve been able to have, and being able to see the world, and I know that I would never have been able to do that without the sport I love. And I always come back to being really thankful for the experiences that I’ve had.”
