The American Allyson Felix, who was playing her fifth Olympic Games at 35, has entered the history of sport. Climbing for the 11th time on an Olympic podium, she passed Carl Lewis and became the second most medalist athlete in history. A legend on the track, but also outside.
“I attacked this relay in peace with myself, just wanting to give it my all. This team was really special because we are not all 400m runners. It was cool to close the Olympics chapter together. my career. I loved it “. It was with these words that Allyson Felix closed his long Olympic career on Saturday August 7 by winning an 11th medal. She was gold on this 4 X 400m relay, after having obtained that of bronze the day before in the final of the 400m.
At 35, the American became a legend. In Tokyo, she confirmed her status as Queen of the Games by becoming the most medal-winning female athlete in Olympic history. The Californian has even overtaken another monument of her sport, Carl Lewis, and is positioned just behind the Finnish Paavo Nurmi (12 medals between 1920 and 1928) in the annals of the discipline.
This incredible harvest of medals, Allyson Felix started it in 2004 at the Athens Games. At the time, she was only 18 years old and already caused a sensation by winning the silver medal in the 200m behind Jamaican Veronica Campbell, setting a new junior world record.
With a pastor father of French Creole origin who teaches the New Testament, the young girl was brought up in a religious atmosphere. In Athens, she then attributes her incredible gift to the “creator”: “My faith is the reason I run. I really feel like I have this incredible gift that God has given me, and it is about to use it to the best of my ability “.
His physical capacities are also to be credited to him. His legs, which soon earned him the nickname “Chicken Legs” for their finesse, and his ample, fluid, incomparable stride, take him to the top of world athletics.
The following year, during the Worlds in Helsinki, she became the youngest world champion in the history of the 200m, overtaking Veronica Campbell-Brown then the French Christine Arron with an incredible acceleration. In 2007, in Osaka, she saw “a great moment, as if in a state of grace” by achieving a hat-trick 200m, 4x100m and 4x400m. Dominating, the American fails to win her first individual Olympic gold medal in Beijing, in 2008. She had to wait for London, four years later, to be crowned on the U-turn.
Giving a voice to African-American mothers
Years go by and his collection of medals continues to grow. In Rio, in 2016, she won a silver medal in the 200m and two new gold medals in the relay. It is then time for her to take a break. In November 2018, Allyson Felix gave birth to her daughter Camryn in complicated conditions, after only 32 weeks of pregnancy. The champion nearly dies during childbirth and her child has to stay almost a month in neonatal care.
This trauma, the athlete recounted a few months later to the United States Congress, during a hearing devoted to racial disparities in maternal mortality in the United States. At the hospital, “my doctors told me that not only my baby was in danger, but me too”, explains the sportswoman. “The only thing that mattered to me was that my daughter survived.” “The doctor came back with even worse news: she told me I had a serious case of pre-eclampsia, and it could be fatal if we don’t act immediately.”
Preeclampsia is a common disease of pregnancy associated with high blood pressure. Often, doctors decide to induce labor. The medical team performed an emergency Caesarean section to deliver baby Camryn. “She wasn’t crying but she was breathing, that’s the only thing that mattered,” Allyson Felix describes. After a month, Camryn and her mother were released from the hospital.
Each year, 700 American women die from pregnancy-related complications. But not all are created equal: Black women are three to four times more at risk than white women. “I realized that my story was not uncommon, other women were like me, black, healthy, and doing their best. And yet they faced death, like me,” sums up the athletics star. “I would really like to encourage African-American mothers to have a voice, and to use it,” she adds.
Discrimination plays a key role in these complications, repeat experts, studies in support – including for wealthy black women like Allyson Felix or tennis player Serena Williams who will also experience a difficult childbirth.
A fight against Nike
This event also causes tensions with its long-time supplier Nike. The champion decides to speak openly and castigate the policy towards pregnant athletes, seeing that the emoluments in her contract had been reduced by 70% during her pregnancy.
“When we have children, we risk lower pay from our sponsors during and after pregnancy. This is one example that proves that the sports industry is still run by and for men.” , she wrote in a New York Times column. Enough to bend the brand to the comma, which swore that no pregnant professional sportswoman would be more financially penalized.
For the first time in her career, the one who saw herself above all as a sprinter, one of whose basic principles is precisely to stay in her lane, gives voice. She becomes an example to many on and off the track.
Retired soon?
Never satisfied, her excellence at the highest level led her to Tokyo, after a global pandemic due to the coronavirus which forced her to adapt in her preparation and to train even in the street, for lack of open installation. “I’m used to fighting. That’s what I keep doing, quite simply,” she sums up.
Allyson Felix has confirmed that this is her last Games, but she has yet to officially announce when she will hang up her spikes. She could participate in the worlds organized in the United States next year. “It’s going to be exciting to see what the next chapter is going to be. I can have a bad day in training, go home and see a little person with absolutely nothing to do, who needs a bath. and to be nourished. It’s a pretty cool dynamic “, she had recently confided in an interview.
With AFP
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