Pregnancy of top athletes: the picture remains bitter

Being a mother and a professional sportswoman can still be perilous. While the subject is regularly brought to the fore, the skipper Clarisse Crémer paid the price Wednesday, February 1. The 33-year-old sailor was deprived of the next Vendée Globe by her sponsor, Team Banque Populaire.

At issue: her maternity leave. Banque Populaire has decided to separate from Clarisse Crémer, arrival 12^e in the last Vendée Globe and first woman for her first participation. A mother since December 2022, her sponsor believes she is unable to qualify for the competition due to the selection rules implemented for the next edition in 2024.

Because, concretely, skippers who do not have a new boat have an obligation to participate in a certain number of qualifying races until the start and to accumulate the miles to decide between them, if the number of candidates exceeds 40.

A delay “not recoverable”

Clarisse Crémer has not been able to participate in any qualifying race at this stage because of her pregnancy, and is now behind schedule which cannot be recovered, according to Banque Populaire.

“We are at 0 thousand and those in front of us are at 1,600. These people will be doing the same races as us so we will never catch up with them… And these are 42, 43 people who are in front”, explained the next day, in press conference, Ronan Lucas, director of Team Banque Populaire.

The team assured that it had done “everything possible” with the organizers to change the rules or “obtain the guarantee of a wildcard” [une invitation]. But, without success, she decided to separate from Crémer, “in view of the human and financial investments” of a Vendée Globe project.

Asked by The Parisianthe director of the Vendée Globe, Alain Leboeuf, admitted to being faced with “a textbook case”, and promised to modify the regulations to allow pregnant women to have a chance to qualify… But not before 2028, the prestigious race held every four years.

In a message broadcast on Thursday, Clarisse Crémer therefore deplored being “left behind” by her sponsor and regretted that “the rules chosen by the Vendée Globe prohibit a woman from having a child”.

Many athletes have supported him on social networks. Judokate Clarisse Agbégnénou, reigning world and Olympic champion, challenged the Vendée Globe on Twitter. “So in 2023, do you continue to widen the F/M inequalities and to punish women because they have the ‘misfortune’ of giving life while pursuing their professional careers?”, She castigated .

Fifa regulations

The exclusion of Clarisse Crémer indeed seems anachronistic, as it goes against the current of the decisions taken on the subject in recent years in various disciplines. The International Football Federation has thus required, since 2021, national federations to include in their regulations maternity leave at least fourteen weeks, including eight after the birth, remunerated at least two-thirds of the contractual salary. The footballer must also be reinstated by her club at the end of her leave, with “appropriate medical and physical support”.

But, on the FFF side, no trace of this device, reported Release last November. If OL showed the example, by supporting side Amel Majri throughout her pregnancy in 2022, the club was sentenced in May by the FIFA Football Court to pay nearly 82,000 euros to Sara Bjork Gunnarsdottir . The Icelandic player, pregnant in 2021, had not received all of her maternity benefits.

Unprecedented, the decision marks a precedent. The world players’ union (Fifpro), which accompanied the footballer in her legal proceedings, underlined a “historic decision, the first of this type since the establishment of Fifa’s maternity regulations”.

In handball too, things are progressing. The discipline has been a pioneer since March 2021: it was the first to adopt a collective agreement in France offering real maternity coverage. The professionals benefit from a collective agreement guaranteeing “the maintenance of the wages of the players by the clubs for one year, in the event of pregnancy”. But the device does not provide for the maintenance of the sportswoman’s contract, which weakens career pursuits. The Olympic vice-champion Chloé Bulleux thus received a registered letter sent by her Toulon club, a few weeks before her delivery. The club denounced his contract, which provided for an additional year as an option. According to the player, such a decision was due neither to a sporting choice nor to a financial choice: only her new status as a mother was in question.

“I went from captain to nothing”

“The club never intended for me to resume. During my pregnancy, they did not calculate me, I found myself a physio, a midwife and I trained alone most of the time , rarely with the physical trainer”, notes, bitter, the winger in a video posted on social networks. “I went from captain to nothing”.

The government has yet worked on the issue. Former Minister of Sports Roxana Maracineanu thus included maternity leave for professional sportswomen in the “women’s sport always” operation, launched in February 2022. “High-level sportswomen must benefit from the same rights as any woman in any other company in France, she then estimated on RCF. Namely: to be able to affirm one’s desire for maternity, to have the right to maternity leave. Considering having a child during a sports career is beneficial for everyone: the child and the mother. And then after maternity, we can find the same level as before, or even a better level.

Proof of this is the footballer Alex Morgan or the athlete Mélina Robert-Michon, who have all shown in their respective sports that motherhood and competition could very well be articulated. But if the law advances, the road remains long. There remains, for example, the question of sponsors, who escape any regulatory influence. “If we have children, we risk cuts in our income from our sponsors during the pregnancy and afterwards”, wrote the athlete Allyson Félix about Nike in le New York Times. If the equipment manufacturer has since reviewed its copy, the subject remains topical. Clarisse Crémer can attest to this.

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With AFP