64 Time July 19/July 26, 2021TOKYO
OLYMPICS
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A Champ
Finds
Her Voice
MOTHERHOOD COULD HAVE COST
ALLYSON FELIX. SHE WOULDN’T LET IT
BY SEAN GREGORY
PHOTOGRAPH BY DJENEBA ADUAYOM FOR TIME
llyson Felix can sTill hear The
screams. In late 2018, the six-time
Olympic gold medalist was sitting in
the neonatal intensive-care unit of a
hospital outside Detroit, watching her weeks-old
daughter fight for her life. Camryn, born prema-
ture at 32 weeks, was hooked up to monitors; an
alarm would go off when doctors needed to stim-
ulate her breathing. But as frightening as those
alarms were, it’s the screaming from a mother in
another area of the NICU that still haunts Felix:
piercing howls that wouldn’t stop. Nurses rushed
to close Felix’s doors. She still doesn’t know
what happened to that mother’s baby, but she
couldn’t help but imagine the worst. And this,
she thought to herself, could happen to Cammy.
Up to this point, Felix had planned to return
to the track and add to her record-setting medal
haul. But in that moment, the most decorated
American female track-and-field Olympian of
all time could not have felt farther from a finish
line. “I just remember thinking, I don’t know if
I’m going to get back,” says Felix. “I don’t know
if I can.”
Felix shares this memory from the driver’s
seat of her Tesla, while crawling up a congested
I-405 in Los Angeles in late May. She’s en route to
a training session for the Tokyo Olympics, which
will be the 35-year-old’s fifth Games. Camryn, 2,
is healthy and starting preschool. But she’s still 2,A
which meant that the night before, she had fought
her usual 8 p.m. bedtime before finally going down
at midnight. So a few weeks out from the Olym-
pic trials, Felix is operating on barely four hours of
sleep. “I think lately she knows that trials are close
or something,” says Felix, with a smile. “She’s, like,
not letting me live.”
It’s a feeling familiar to any working par-
ent, though the physicality of Felix’s job adds
a burden foreign to most. But Felix has deftly
handled this juggling act to make it back to the
Olympics—this time with a larger mission be-
yond the track.
For almost of all her career, Felix stayed
in her lane: she saw it as her job to win medals,
and rarely raised her voice on social issues.
“You need to make sure you don’t say too much.
It has to be this pretty, pretty package. That’s
always been in the back of my head,” Felix says.
“And that’s not real.”
Especially after what she went through to
have Camryn. During pregnancy, Felix devel-
oped preeclampsia, a condition marked by high
blood pressure and adverse childbirth outcomes
that is more prevalent in African-American
women, which contributed to Camryn’s dan-
gerous early birth. Though everyone ended up
fine, America’s vast racial disparities in maternal
mortality could well have pointed to a different
outcome: a CDC study published in 2019 found
that a Black woman with at least a college degree
was 5.2 times more likely to die in pregnancy or
childbirth than her white counterpart. That year,
Felix felt compelled to testify before Congress on
the topic. “We need to provide women of color
with more support during their pregnancies,”
Felix told the House Ways and Means Commit-
tee. “Research shows that racial bias in our ma-
ternal health care system includes things like
providers spending less time with Black mothers,
under estimating the pain of their Black patients,
ignoring symptoms and dismissing complaints.”
Felix then took a bigger leap: in a New York
Times op-ed, she accused Nike, her longtime
sponsor and a kingmaker in her sport, of penal-
izing her and other pregnant athletes in contract
negotiations. The move was fraught. Felix risked
losing her primary source of income and could
have been blacklisted from major meets.
Felix soon left Nike and signed with Athleta,
becoming the women-focused apparel brand’s
first athlete sponsor, paving the way for Simone
Biles to make a similar move to Athleta in April.
On June 23, Felix announced the founding of her
own footwear and apparel brand, Saysh. Far from
following corporate expectations, Felix is now
taking full agency over her career—and legacy.
With one more medal in Tokyo, Felix—who