Competing for two: Pregnant Olympians push the boundaries of possibility in Paris

PARIS (AP) — 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 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.

The choice to combine motherhood and a sports career involves many factors, to be sure, which vary by sport and by country. Franchina Martinez, 24, who competes in track for the Dominican Republic, says more female athletes retire early than male athletes in her country, and one reason is pregnancy.

“When they get pregnant, they believe they won’t be able to return, unlike in more developed countries where they might be able to,” said Martinez. “So they quit the sport, they don’t return to compete, or they aren’t the same.”

For the sake of her career, she said, she doesn’t plan to have children in the near future: “As long as I can avoid it for the sake of my sport, I will postpone it because I am not ready for that yet.”

At the Paris fencing venue over the weekend, fans were mixed between admiration for the bravery and determination of Hafez, a 26-year-old former gymnast with a degree in medicine, and speculation about whether it was risky.

“There are certainly sports that are less violent,” said Pauline Dutertre, 29, sitting outside the elegant Grand Palais during a break in action alongside her father, Christian. Dutertre had competed herself on the international circuit in saber until 2013. “It is, after all, a combat sport.”

“In any case,” she noted, “it is courageous. Even without making it to the podium, what she did was brave.”

Marilyne Barbey, attending the fencing from Annecy in southeastern France with her family, wondered about safety too, but added: “You can fall anywhere, at any time. And, in the end, it is her choice.”

Ramazanova, who was visibly pregnant when competing, also earned admiration, including from her peers. She reached the final 32 in her event.

Casey Kaufhold, an American who earned bronze in the mixed team category, said it was “really cool” to see her Azerbaijani colleague achieving what she did.

“I think it’s awesome that we see more expecting 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. “She shot really well, and I think it’s really cool because my coach is also a mother and she’s been doing so much to support her kids even while she’s away."

Kaufhold said she hoped Ramazanova's run would inspire more mothers and expectant mothers to compete. And she had a more personal thought for the mom-to-be:

“I think it’s awesome for this archer that one day, she can tell her kid, ‘Hey, I went to the Olympic Games and you were there, too.’”

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Associated Press journalists Cliff Brunt and Hanna Arhirova contributed from Paris.

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For more coverage of the Paris Olympics, visit https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games.