The Evolution of Allyson Felix

In 2019, Olympic sprinter Allyson Felix broke Usain Bolt’s record for the most track-and-field world championship titles in history. She did it 10 months after nearly dying from pregnancy complications and delivering her first child via C-section. Let that sink in.

I always offer up this post-birth fact as a way of introducing the 38-year-old athlete to the rare person who isn’t familiar with her. This particular accomplishment, perhaps more than any other, paints the clearest picture of the type of athlete—and woman—Felix is. Her body, less than a year postpartum, would still be putting itself back together. And yet she showed up at the 4x400-meter mixed relay in Doha, Qatar, and snatched the record from the world’s fastest man. If you’ve ever birthed a child, you’d know what an exceptional feat this is. And if you haven’t, trust me when I say, the word superhuman isn’t just hyperbole.

Unlike so many athletes who make the jump from sports stardom to cultural figure, Felix isn’t flashy, content with a quieter aura of power. She may not have the Instagram following of Ilona Maher or the endorsements of Naomi Osaka, but her record as the most decorated track-and-field athlete in history—14-time world champion, 10-time national champion, 7-time Olympic champion—more than earns her a spot in the same class as first-name-only GOATS like Serena and Simone.

Almost two decades after she made her Olympic debut in Athens—bringing home the first of what would be 11 Olympic medals over the course of five Olympic Games—Felix announced in 2022 she’d be retiring from the sport she dominated. But instead of kicking back and basking in her legacy, she’s been hard at work advocating for structural changes that would better support all women—whether athletes or not—in the workplace. Think childcare. Paid leave. Places to pump with dignity.

“I think by nature I’m like, Push, push, push,” she says. “There’s still just so much to be doing.”

A few of those things include finishing a forthcoming memoir (“writing it feels like some form of therapy”). And running a business (“sometimes it feels like battle after battle”). And decompressing from the Paris Olympics, where she just spearheaded the first Olympic nursery to provide childcare to competing athletes and successfully campaigned among her peers to be elected to the International Olympic Committee (“very humbling”). And deploying the $20 million grant from Melinda French Gates supporting her work advocating for Black maternal health (“I was like, ‘Wait, you’re doing what?” she says of that phone call from Gates; more on that to come). And of course, there’s the fact that she just had her second child in April (“by far my greatest accomplishment,” Felix wrote of being mom to daughter Camryn, five, and son Trey, four months).

Felix takes a breath. “Right now it still feels like I’m grinding it out.” And this drive is what has earned her the Face of Change Award, presented by #SmartTox and Glamour.

When Felix and I sit down for a lemonade at an out-of-the-way hotel near LA’s Studio City in August, I have a long list of questions about her recent projects. But first, mom code dictates I ask Felix something else: How is she sleeping with a four-month-old at home?

“He sleeps in three-hour waves. We might get a four-hour stretch every now and then,” she says. “I feel like I’m finally….” She pauses, searching for a word in a way that is deeply recognizable to anyone who has groped their way through postpartum fog. “I feel like I’m finally used to being tired now,” she says. “It’s just like, Okay, this is the state that we’re in.”

In a different cultural climate, Felix’s deliberate and unequivocal marketing of herself as not just a woman in sports but a mother in sports might be less relevant. But at this particular political crossroads, Felix’s motherhood is central to her story.

In many ways, becoming a mom has defined Felix’s career. In 2019 she spoke out against her long-time sponsor Nike for their treatment of pregnant athletes in a viral op-ed for The New York Times. “If I, one of Nike’s most widely marketed athletes, couldn’t secure these protections, who could?” she wrote.

Felix’s contract had come up for renewal in 2017, and Nike reportedly offered her less than her previous deal. So when she found out she was pregnant shortly after, she didn’t dare share it with the company at first, fearing that it would devalue her even further. For months she hid her pregnancy, training at 4 a.m. “This is a time that should be celebrated, but looking back, I often feel like I wasn’t even pregnant. It’s really sad,” Felix told me when I interviewed her in 2022 for my book Money, Power, Respect: How Women in Sports Are Shaping the Future of Feminism.

At 32 weeks pregnant, she’d been rushed to the hospital for an emergency C-section after a routine checkup revealed a life-threatening case of preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication characterized by a spike in blood pressure five times more likely to be fatal for Black women. She spent the next several weeks in the NICU with her daughter, worrying, on top of everything else, whether she would have a sponsor to return to. “It definitely took a lot out of me at a very crucial time,” she told me in that interview.

Her outspokenness catapulted her to the center of a long-simmering frustration with the lack of support for parents, and particularly those who identify as mothers, in the workplace. Unable to reach an agreement with Nike, Felix parted ways with her long-time sponsor, signing a deal with Athleta in 2019 and launching her own shoe company, Saysh, in 2021.

Her advocacy in calling out major industry players for their treatment of pregnant athletes (alongside other prominent runners including Alysia Montaño and Kara Goucher) eventually helped create change. In 2018, Nike standardized its approach to pregnancy in athlete contracts, waiving pregnancy-related performance pay reductions for 12 months. (In 2019 it expanded pregnancy-related protections to 18 months.) Burton, Altra, Nuun, and Brooks also amended athlete contracts to include maternity protections.

The shift at Nike is great. It’s also a little frustrating, if she’s being honest.

“I mean, it was such a fight,” Felix says of her own ultimately unsuccessful talks with the brand, with whom, she says, she’s had no contact since negotiations ended. “You want them to change and embrace it. They’re this huge company. They should be leaders in supporting moms. But it feels like women’s sports is having a moment and now they’re showing up. It just seems like, if it was authentic, it would have been done a long time ago.”

[Editor’s note: Nike provided the following statement in response to questions about the company’s record of supporting women athletes. “Nike has been pushing for change alongside our female athletes, from championing for their rights to play sport with Title IX and the first women’s marathon in 1984 to setting new industry standards in 2018 and again in 2019 when we expanded our maternity policy to 18 months so that female athletes don’t have to choose between being great mothers and great athletes. We are honored to sponsor and partner with the largest roster of female athletes in the world and in the last five years we pledged to invest even more in the future of women’s sports. While there is more to be done, we are proud of where we are today and remain committed to being an industry leader in championing female athletes and women’s sports.”]

For her part, Felix has been nonstop in her push to advocate for mothers in sports and beyond. After calling for better treatment of pregnant athletes in 2019, Felix testified before Congress on the racial disparities in maternal mortality the same year. (The US Black maternal mortality rate is the worst of any wealthy nation—Black women in the US are more than twice as likely to die as a result of pregnancy-related complications as white women, according to a 2024 report.) In 2021 she partnered with the Women’s Sports Foundation and Athleta to sponsor childcare grants for moms competing in the Tokyo Olympics, and in 2022 teamed up with Athleta and &Mother (an advocacy organization founded by Montaño) to provide childcare at the USATF Outdoor Track and Field Championships.

This advocacy eventually led to the call she received in July from Melinda French Gates, which Felix describes as “very shocking” and “super humbling.” With the grant, Felix will focus her newfound philanthropic firepower on organizations that focus on Black maternal health through research, policy, and on-the-ground organizations that “are most in touch with the people who are at risk,” Felix says.

In addition to the fulfilling opportunity to get money into the hands of organizations working to improve outcomes for countless women and families, the French Gates grant is also proof: People care about Black mothers.

“Sometimes it feels like, Does anybody else care about these issues?” Felix says. “When you’re in it, you’re like, Am I doing anything? I feel like I’m trying really hard but I don’t know if it’s making a difference at all. And then this huge thing happens where it’s like, ‘Absolutely, and I’m going to help you.’”

Felix and I first spoke about her mission to make sports more inclusive of moms in 2020, and in the time between that pandemic-era call and our current late-summer drink, I’ve become a mom myself. I understand now just how easy it is to get sidelined, how exceedingly laborious it is to fight this fight.

Advocating for yourself when your boss, or your sponsor, or your industry, doesn’t support your evolution is work. Pushing for basic structural support like paid family leave under the weight of the motherhood penalty is exhausting. Concealing leaking breasts, chronic sleep deprivation, and the creeping feeling that you don’t recognize yourself anymore in all professional contexts is its own full-time job. And you’re Just. So. Tired.

Finding the energy to advocate for yourself is…so hard, I say to Felix, not totally sure if I’m asking a question or simply looking for validation.

“So hard,” she echoes. “I think about all of the women athletes before me. I was talking to a retired teammate probably a year ago, and she was saying that she never realized her potential because she chose to have kids. It got to this point where it was just like, It doesn’t make sense to keep fighting for this dream. There’s countless stories like that.”

The fight to support moms in sports isn’t really about sports. It’s not even really about moms. It’s about expanding the spectrum of possibilities for women in a culture determined to reduce us all, regardless of gender, to our reproductive choices.

Seeing moms like Allyson Felix, Naomi Osaka, Alex Morgan, or Serena Williams compete at the highest level “tells the next generation what’s possible,” Felix says. When Camryn, now five, sees these women compete, she doesn’t think there’s anything weird about the fact that they’re parents and professionals.

That might seem like a small observation. But it represents a massive cultural shift that’s happened in Camryn’s short lifetime. A shift that’s happened in part because of her—and her mom.

In an industry in which motherhood was until recently seen as a complete and total career killer, I point out, many of Felix’s biggest accomplishments have happened since she became a mom.

“There’s so much fear. Not because it’s going to be over, but because it could be,” she says. “I had this feeling of ‘Do everything,’ just in case it was over.

“Motherhood does change you. But it doesn’t end you,” she says. “You become a new version of yourself. And I think a lot of times we’re scared to lose ourselves. But the evolution of the self is very beautiful.”

Felix’s ability to hold her center in moments of unsteady evolution and still show up, still perform, still put in the work, is what makes her so exceptional as both an athlete and an advocate.

“I think I’ll always see myself as an athlete first. At my core, that’s who I am, and I bring that mentality to everything that I do,” she says.

Calling herself an advocate still feels a little unfamiliar. In fact, Felix still doesn’t consider herself a political person, despite the fact that the issues closest to her heart have become almost impossible to separate from political rhetoric, and in the case of paid leave and childcare, key pillars of Kamala Harris’s campaign. (When asked if Harris, a member of the historically African American sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, will be getting a pair of Saysh’s green and pink AKA Felix Runners, Felix, an honorary member, doesn’t hesitate: “I have some for her! As soon as I have the opportunity.”)

Felix also applied her athlete’s mentality to the birth of her son, Trey, in April. “With Camryn, I think I was almost too tightly wound to my birth plan. When it didn’t happen, I was kind of distraught over it,” she says. “Understanding that other things can happen is a better way to be.” This time around she was intentional about controlling the controllables, working with a Black doctor and doula to prepare for the unmedicated vaginal birth she’d hoped for with her first pregnancy, all while acknowledging the fear and uncertainty in the experience.

Her second pregnancy proved to be a “healing experience.” But it was also marked by the reality that she still faced racial health disparities. “The second time around I understood the most important thing was being alive and having my baby. Going into this pregnancy, we revisited our will and made sure all of that was taken care of. Who wants to be doing those things?” Felix says. “But we knew what could happen and we wanted to be prepared.”

Ultimately, Felix had the unmedicated vaginal birth after cesarean, or VBAC, she hoped for. “Though I got in the middle and I was like, Did I really want this?” she says with a laugh.

Three months later Felix was at the Paris Olympics. It was the first Games in two decades that she hadn’t competed in. “I wasn’t sure what to expect. There’s this loss and grief over part of it,” she says. There was also excitement about experiencing the Olympics in a different way—such as having the chance to witness, with her daughter, Simone Biles win gold on vault. “I’m really glad that I’m at this point in my life right now where I do get to do this. Yeah, I have to pump at opening ceremonies, but I also have these two beautiful children and they’re with me at work and I get to take this all in with them,” she says.

Was there space to pump at the opening ceremony?

Felix cuts me off after “space,” anticipating the question before I can even finish.

“There wasn’t,” she says, describing the (“nicer?”) port-a-potty she resorted to. “There’s something else to tackle!”

With her recent election to the International Olympic Committee, Felix can actually tackle that problem in 2028. She was one of four athletes (three of whom are women) elected to an eight-year term representing athletes’ interests in designing the Olympic experience.

Being the high-achieving woman that she is, Felix is already thinking of ways she can be helpful—for one, learning about the process by which the USOPC can appeal the decision by the IOC to ask gymnast Jordan Chiles to return her bronze medal.

“My heart just broke for her because I feel like it tainted her entire Olympic Games. I was in the village campaigning for the IOC election the morning that the gymnastics team went to their team competition, and I ran into all the girls. They were just so excited and so happy and hopeful,” Felix says. “She’s such a young girl and, as a mother, I just feel like she should have been protected. None of this is on her at all, but she’s the one dealing with all of the effects of it.”

Continuing her work to support competing moms with plans for bigger and better on-site childcare options in LA will be a big part of her agenda. But supporting women holistically starts with listening. Working with athletes from around the globe “puts in perspective the viewpoints of every place in the world,” she says. “We’re always thinking about things that affect us in America, but this really is a global position. Seeing the issues some women in sport are facing is very sobering.” In the weeks following our interview, fellow Olympian Rebecca Cheptegei, a Ugandan distance runner who placed 44th in the marathon in Paris, was set on fire by a former partner and died as a result, a reminder of the gender-based violence and abuse that women athletes face at disproportionately high rates.

Felix is passionate about using whatever tools she has at her disposal to change both the systems that support women and the cultural beliefs that often undercut them. But with passion often comes anger and frustration over the limiting realities so many women still face. How does she avoid burnout?

“I really try to hold space, to feel all the things, and to see the individuals that I’m fighting on behalf of,” Felix says. “It’s challenging, but I do think it’s necessary to understand how bad some of these situations are. Then we can say, ‘Okay, time to get to work. Where do we begin?’”

Macaela MacKenzie is a former Glamour editor and author of Money, Power, Respect: How Women in Sports Are Shaping the Future of Feminism.

Photographer: Kanya Iwana
Stylist: Dione Davis
Hair: Vernon Francois
Makeup: Autumn Moultrie
Set designer: Priscilla Lee
Manicurist: Stephanie Stone
Production: Joy Marie Thomas

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Originally Appeared on Glamour