Many Olympic athletes take to Instagram to share news of their exploits, trials, victories and heartbreaks. After her fencing event ended last week, Egypt’s Nada Hafez shared a little bit more.
She’d been fencing for two, the athlete revealed - and in fact had been pregnant for seven months.
“What appears to you as two players on the podium, they were actually three!” Hafez wrote, under an emotional picture of her during the match.
“It was me, my competitor, &; my yet-to-come to our world, little baby!” Mom (and baby) finished the competition ranked 16th, Hafez’s best result in three Olympics.
A day later, an Azerbaijani archer was also revealed on Instagram to have competed while six-and-a-half months pregnant. Yaylagul Ramazanova told Xinhua News she’d felt her baby kick before she took a shot - and then shot a 10, the maximum number of points.
There have been pregnant Olympians and Paralympians before, though the phenomenon is rare for obvious reasons. Still, most stories have been of athletes competing when they’re far earlier in their pregnancies - or not even far enough along to know they were expecting.
Like U.S. Beach volleyball star Kerri Walsh Jennings, who won her third gold medal while, unknowingly, five weeks pregnant with her third child.
“When I was throwing my body around fearlessly, 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 volleyball player) had only started trying to conceive right before the Olympics, she said, figuring it would take time. But she felt different, and volleyball partner Misty May-Treanor said to her - presciently, it turned out - “You’re probably pregnant.”
It makes sense that pregnant athletes are pushing boundaries now, one expert says, as both attitudes and knowledge develop about what women can do deep into pregnancy.
“This is something we’re seeing more and more of,” says Dr. Kathryn Ackerman, a sports medicine physician and co-chair of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s women’s health task force, “as women are dispelling the myth that you can’t exercise at a high level when you’re pregnant.”
Ackerman notes there’s been little data, and so past decisions on the matter have often been arbitrary. But, she says, “doctors now recommend that if an athlete is in good condition going into pregnancy, and there are no complications, then it’s safe to work out, train, and compete at a very high level.”
An exception, she says, might be something like ski racing, where the risk of a bad fall is great.
But in fencing, says the Boston-based Ackerman, there is clearly protective padding for athletes, and in less physically strenuous sports like archery or shooting, there’s absolutely no reason a woman can’t compete.
It’s not just an issue of physical fitness, of course. It is deeply emotional. Deciding whether and how to compete while trying to also grow a family is a thorny calculus that male athletes simply don’t have to consider - at least in anywhere near the same way.
Just ask Serena Williams, who famously won the Australian Open in 2017 while pregnant with her first child. When, some five years later, she wanted to try for a second, she stepped back from tennis - an excruciating decision.
“Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family,” Williams - who won four Olympic golds - wrote in a Vogue essay. “I don’t think it’s fair. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor 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 that U.S. Softball player Michele Granger’s mother reportedly suggested for the baby Granger was carrying when she pitched 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 her name,” said Granger to Gold Country Media in 2011. The baby was named Kady.
