Allyson Felix - The Caregiver
TRACK & FIELD - TEAM USA -
200m - 400m - 4x100m - 4x400m
ARCHETYPE: THE CAREGIVER
Day 42/135
Athletic Accomplishments
With nine Olympic medals and 18 World Athletics Championship medals, sprinter Allyson Felix is the most accomplished and decorated athlete in American track and field. Just take a look at her dominance across multiple events:
400m
2015 World Champion
2011 World silver medalist
2017 World bronze medalist
200m
2012 Olympic gold medal
2x Olympic silver medal
3x World Champion
Relays
5x Olympic gold medals
2 4x100m (includes world record in 2012)
3 4x400m
Felix is a 5-time winner of USATF’s Jackie Joyner-Kersee Award, given to the most outstanding athlete.
She is a sight to behold while hugging the curves of the track. She runs like a gazelle—slight of frame but deceptively powerful, with lean, muscular legs that put the “fittest” into Darwin’s survival theories.
(For what it’s worth, I just spent 15 minutes researching the difference between gazelles and deer, specifically so I could figure out which lean, gorgeous, athletic creature is a more apt comparison for Allyson Felix. Ultimately I decided on gazelle for one reason: they’re faster.)
Character Archetype: The Caregiver
With 9 Olympic medals—6 of them gold—and 18 World Athletics Championship medals, Allyson Felix is the most accomplished and decorated athlete in American track and field. She has competed in the 200m, 400m, and the 4x100m and 4x400m relays across four different Olympic Games. This summer she’ll be trying for her fifth.
Yet Felix’s most impactful legacy may not be on the track, but what she has done for women in sports, specifically moms, expecting moms, and those who want to be moms.
In 2018, Felix delivered her daughter 8 weeks early, by emergency C-section, after pregnancy complications. Throughout her 2018 pregnancy, she had been trying to renegotiate her contract as a Nike sponsored athlete, but things got contentious, as Felix felt that Nike's maternity policies were almost punishing her for starting a family. In a 2019 op-ed she wrote for the New York Times, Felix said she felt rushed and "pressure to return to form as soon as possible" after her daughter's birth. More importantly, she said that Nike wanted to pay her 70% less than before she'd had her daughter.
"What I’m not willing to accept is the enduring status quo around maternity," Felix wrote. "I asked Nike to contractually guarantee that I wouldn’t be punished if I didn’t perform at my best in the months surrounding childbirth. I wanted to set a new standard. If I, one of Nike’s most widely marketed athletes, couldn’t secure these protections, who could?"
As a result of going public, Nike has since changed its maternity policies, guaranteeing protection to their sponsored athletes for 18 months. It's hard not to draw a direct line back to Felix's public advocacy on the issue.
Felix, who had already severed ties with Nike, didn’t speak out for herself. She did it for the benefit of the next generation of athletes and moms. Mothers gonna mother, amirite?