Olympian? Mom? Why family planning can be tricky for athletes who want to be both (2024)

Ranked second in the world before deciding to have a baby, Canadian flyweight boxing champ Mandy Bujold felt the fear most elite female athletes do when mulling motherhood: Would she come back as strong as before?

She came back stronger, a “2.0 version of myself.” Bujold resumed training within six weeks of giving birth to her oldest daughter Kate Olympia in November 2018. Six months later, she was back competing at the international level and back on the podium, winning medals.

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It wasn’t easy, dropping the pregnancy weight to get back to her fighting weight. “The pelvic floor stuff was difficult,” she said, “understanding how to rebuild those muscles. Things in your body are still shifting. For months after you can feel that your body moves a bit differently.”

Bujold took time off to have a baby at a time when there weren’t supposed to be any Olympic qualifying events. “Then things got messy.” After a planned qualifier was cancelled due to COVID, the International Olympic Committee retroactively used qualifying events from 2018 and 2019 — when Bujold was on maternity leave. Denied a berth at the Tokyo Games, Bujold took the IOC to the Court of Arbitration for Sports in Switzerland, and won. “It ended up being one of the biggest fights of my career.”

Bujold retired after the 2020 Games but is still asked constantly: How did she figure out the best time to have a baby? “Because it’s scary, right?”

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For female athletes in their 20s and 30s, the age of peak performance overlaps with their age of peak fertility, and those “overlapping windows,” researcher have reported, can mean having to choose: Mother? Elite athlete? Both? Delay having kids and risk the chances of ever becoming pregnant? Freeze your eggs? Stop competing, retire and be a mother?

“Athletes don’t have a good sense of what’s going to happen to them when they become pregnant,” said Margie Davenport, a pregnancy researcher and associate professor in the University of Alberta’s faculty of kinesiology, sport and recreation.

“We need policies in place, and they need to be very clear. We need to be able to allow athletes to know what is going to happen to their career, their training, their spot on the team, before they become pregnant, when they’re even considering it.”

More work is also needed to better understand the limits of training and competition during pregnancy, and how to return safely in the postpartum period, she said. “From marathon runner Paula Radcliffe to tennis star Serena Williams and most recently sprinter Allyson Felix, female athletes are pushing against the societal narrative that they should ‘take it easy’ during pregnancy,” Davenport and her co-authors wrote in “Pushing for Change,” their study exploring the experiences of 20 women who navigated pregnancy as elite athletes.

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Pregnancy was once considered an “injury” under federal government funding schemes. Canadian athletes who meet a certain ranking are permitted to have one major injury before their monthly stipend is cut off. A female athlete who required a “card” for pregnancy wouldn’t be eligible for another card if she were to get injured.

Pregnancy is no longer tossed in with fractures or pulled hamstrings, and many sports no longer have the one card rule. Still, the regulations around funding can be fuzzy and often differ within sport, and when “pregnancy” and “career” don’t align, athletes have chosen to delay pregnancy or retire from sport, Davenport and her co-authors wrote. While some of the women they interviewed described their coaches as “awesome” and “super supportive,” others were afraid to disclose their pregnancy, or even their desire to become pregnant.

Davenport is a former national team synchronized swimmer. “When I was an athlete, I was considered quite old at 25, and I retired because I felt so old. Which is crazy now, because we’re seeing athletes into their late 20s and their 30s, even into their 40s, competing at the highest level.”

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South of the border, one such athlete receiving a lot of attention is Elle Purrier St. Pierre, a middle- and long-distance runner who represented the United States at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. She gave birth to her first son in March 2023 and was back competing six months later, racing to a World Indoor Championship gold medal in the 3,000 metres just days before her son’s first birthday. Last month, she punched her ticket to two events in Paris by winning the U.S. Olympic Trials 5,000m and finishing third in the 1,500m (she will focus on the 1,500m at the Games).

“There’s so many things that women have to balance that men don’t,” the 29-year-old said after her races in a video interview posted by The Skimm. “I’ll be honest, I just got my period back for the first time since I had a baby and that was the week of the Olympic Trials. Men don’t have to deal with that. I don’t know. Just, women are awesome.”

Some elite female athletes are freezing their eggsearly in their careers to try to extend their fertility window. But egg freezing is exceptionally expensive (about $10,000 per cycle), there are no guarantees of a pregnancy or live birth and the hormonal drugs women inject into their bellies or thighs to stimulate the ovaries to churn out more eggs than normal can cause bloating and other side effects. “Some athletes have to go through multiple cycles to be successful,” Davenport said.

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For months after you can feel that your body moves a bit differently

Timing can be tough. “During an Olympic cycle, you want to get pregnant in the first year of the cycle before your quadrennial … like you have a very narrow window to try and succeed or wait another four years,” one athlete told Davenport and her research colleagues.Women will try to become pregnant just before or immediately after an Olympic game, so that they have enough time to qualify for the next go round. But things don’t necessarily work out as planned.

Some women struggle to conceive, though It’s not clear whether the intensity of training affects a woman’s fertility. “I was still training fully. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, can I go in a sauna? Oh my God, should I be training? Maybe this is the reason I’m not getting pregnant,” one athlete in the Pushing for Change study said.

While more research is underway, Davenport suspects it’s not necessarily the training itself, per se, but rather an overall low energy availability, or insufficient caloric intake, meaning not eating enough calories, to support reproductive function and normal menstrual cycles.

As to what’s safe and what isn’t during pregnancy, the old thinking was that women shouldn’t exceed 140 heartbeats per minute, which equates to a moderate intensity of exercise. “The rationale behind that was that they didn’t know whether it was safe to exercise in pregnancy, at all,” Davenport said.

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More recent work has found great benefits to exercising during pregnancy. Davenport led development of the 2019 Canadian guidelines that recommended pregnant women accumulate at least 150 minutes (about two and a half hours) per week of moderate physical activity.

She’s now heading the 2026 update for International Olympic Committee guidelines and expects to have “much more solid recommendations” for elite athletes. Different types of high intensity exercise may be safer than previously thought, she said. Her own data from a small study suggest both mother and fetus can safely tolerate short bursts of high intensity training.

With heavy lifting in a recreational setting — “going to the gym and doing deadlifts, squats and that sort of thing” — women shouldn’t exceed 20 pounds. But many elite athletes are lifting well over 100 or 200 pounds, “and we’re not seeing adverse effects for the mother or the baby,” Davenport said.

“Those who continue to lift heavy during their pregnancy who were lifting before pregnancy have better health outcomes than if they do what the guidelines say, which is to reduce their intensity, or stop,” Davenport said. Better outcomes like fewer cases of gestational diabetes or pre-eclampsia (high blood pressure) in the mom, and no increased risk of adverse fetal outcomes, meaning babies aren’t born earlier or smaller “and appear to be quite healthy, based on the evidence we have right now.”

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Evidence is also accumulating that elite athletes who return postpartum are returning to the same level of performance, in some cases exceeding their previous personal best, especially runners — marathoners but also shorter-distance runners. As pregnancy progresses, a woman’s blood volume increases by 50 per cent. The heart works harder — and gets stronger — in order to pump more blood through the body, cardiovascular effects that persist a little longer after delivery.

But there’s a psychological component as well.“Your motivation is going to change, in some respects,” Davenport said. “You’re going to be very focused when you’re at training, because you probably have a bit more limited time. But we’ve also had athletes tell us they have something else in their life. Their entire life is no longer just sport.

“And so, there’s a little less pressure, less stress, that they must achieve whatever goal. That their life is going to be okay. That helps them perform better in the end.”

Bujold has joined other athlete mentors for a new initiative, MOMentum, to help female athletes with family planning needs. Supported by an OLY Canada Legacy Grant, a program that supports Olympian-led initiatives, the online platform offers resources, mentorships and grants, starting with grants to support mothers heading to this summer’s Olympic or Paralympic games.

“There might be a mom who is breastfeeding and needs to be able to send the milk back home, or bring their child with them,” said Bujold, an 11-time Canadian national champ whose precedent-setting case forced the IOC to make accommodations for any female who is pregnant or postpartum during Olympic qualifying periods.

After her legal win, Bujold received messages from women, in sport and out of it, the world over. “It really opened my eyes to, wow, what women deal with when they are taking that time, and that little step back, and how much it can hurt their careers.”

National Post

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