PARIS– Many Olympic athletes Go to Instagram to share news of your exploits, trials, victories and sorrows. After her fencing event ended last week, Egyptian Nada Hafez shared a little more.
She was fencing two ago, the athlete revealed – and in fact she had been pregnant for seven months.
“What to you seems like two players on the podium was actually three!” Hafez wrote, under an emotional photo of her during the match. “It was me, my competitor, & my what is yet to come to our world, little baby! The mother (and baby) finished the competition in 16th place, Hafez’s best result in three Olympics.
A day later, an Azerbaijani archer was also revealed On Instagram having competed while six and a half months pregnant. Yaylagul Ramazanova said Xinhua News she felt her baby kick before she shot – and then scored 10, the maximum number of points.
There was pregnant Olympic and Paralympic athletes rather, although the phenomenon is rare for obvious reasons. Still, most of the stories have been of athletes competing when their pregnancies were very advanced – or not even far enough along to know they were pregnant.
As the US 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 2012 London Games. She and her husband Casey (also a beach volleyball player) They had just started trying to get pregnant right before the Olympics, she said, figuring it would take time. But she felt different, and volleyball partner Misty May-Treanor told her — presciently, it turned out — “You’re probably pregnant.”
It makes sense that pregnant athletes are pushing the limits now, says one expert, as attitudes and knowledge develop about what women can do during pregnancy.
“This is something we’re seeing more and more,” 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 that there is little data, and therefore previous decisions on the subject have often been arbitrary. But, she says, “doctors now recommend that if an athlete is in good condition during pregnancy and there are no complications, then it is safe to train, 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 high.
But in fencing, says Ackerman of Boston, there is clearly protection for athletes, and in less physically strenuous sports like archery or archery, there is absolutely no reason a woman can’t compete.
It’s not just a question of fitness, of course. It’s deeply emotional. Deciding whether and how to compete while also trying to raise a family is a thorny calculation that male athletes simply do not need to consider – at least anywhere near the same way.
Just ask Serena Williams, who won the Australian Open in 2017 while pregnant with her first child. When, about five years later, she wanted to try it for a second, she gave up tennis – a painful decision.
“Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family,” wrote Williams – who has won four Olympic gold medals – in an essay for Vogue. “I don’t think it’s fair. If I were a man, I wouldn’t be writing this because I would be out there playing and earning while my wife did the physical work of expanding our family. Maybe I would 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 American softball player Michele Granger’s mother reportedly suggested for the baby Granger was carrying when she pitched in the gold medal 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,” Granger said. for Gold Country Media in 2011. The baby was named Kady.
At the Paris fencing venue over the weekend, fans were confused between admiration for the bravery and determination of Hafez, a 26-year-old former gymnast with a medical degree, and speculation about whether it was risky.
“There are certainly less violent sports,” said Pauline Dutertre, 29, sitting outside the elegant Grand Palais during a break in the action alongside her father, Christian. Dutertre competed on the international saber circuit until 2013. “After all, it is a combat sport.”
“Anyway,” she noted, “it’s brave. Even without reaching the podium, what she did was courageous.”
Marilyne Barbey, who was watching the fencing in Annecy, southeast France, with her family, also wondered about safety, but added: “We could fall anywhere, at any time. And in the end, the choice is hers.”
Ramazanova, who was visibly pregnant during the competition, also gained admiration, including from her peers. She reached the final 32 in her event.
Casey Kaufhold, an American who won bronze in the mixed team category, said it was “really cool” to see her Azerbaijani colleague achieving what she did.
“I think it’s amazing that we’re seeing more pregnant mothers shooting at the Olympics and it’s great to have one in archery,” she said in comments to the Associated Press. “She threw really well and I think it’s really cool because my coach is also a mother and has done a lot to support her kids even when she’s away.”
Kaufhold said she hopes Ramazanova’s race inspires more mothers and pregnant women to compete. And she had a more personal thought for the mother-to-be:
“I think it’s amazing for this archer that one day she can say to her son, ‘Hey, I went to the Olympics and you were there too.’”
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Associated Press journalist Cliff Brunt contributed from Paris.
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For more Paris Olympics coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games.
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