What Happens When The Olympic Dream Is Over? For Allyson Felix, It’s A Whole New Game

In some ways I’m sure this time of year will always feel like “Olympic season.” My first time competing in the games was 20 years ago, in Athens, and when you devote so much of yourself — your time, your focus, your sweat — to this one thing, it’s almost like you develop an internal Olympic clock that’s set to go off every four years. Part of me is still on that time. But then I get hit with the realization that this part of my life is over. The Olympics are still happening this year — I’m just not part of them, at least not in the way I used to be. 

It can be hard. I think a certain amount of grief is only natural, but two things can be true. Because I’m also really psyched to be able to attend the Paris games in a new capacity, and to experience what it’s like without that all-consuming pressure, especially when there is so much positive momentum around women’s sport. It’s not like I’ll be lazing by the Seine, eating baguettes the whole time. I’m going to be one of the Olympics correspondents for Yahoo Sports, and I’m also working with the Athletes’ Commission on the International Olympic Committee, which I was appointed to after my retirement in 2022.

Just this month, I announced a new partnership with Pampers to bring the first-ever nursery to the Olympic Village. It’s a place in the heart of the action, where athlete parents can spend time with their babies and young children: to bond, nurse, play, and just experience a level of recognition and respect from the athletic community that has been so lacking in the past. I can still remember arriving at the Tokyo games three years ago: having absolutely no idea how I was supposed to be a new mom and an Olympic athlete, and just feeling so alone. 

My sport, running, has a particularly poor track record when it comes to the treatment of maternal athletes. Pregnancy has often been referred to as “the kiss of death,” and a lot of women would go to a lot of trouble to hide it — particularly if they happened to be re-negotiating a sponsorship contract at the time. Which I was, with Nike, when I got pregnant in 2018. For track athletes, their main source of income is traditionally from their shoe sponsor.

I probably shouldn’t have been shocked when they came back to me with an offer that was only 30% of my previous earnings, but I was. I guess I had thought all of my success up to that point, including nine Olympic medals, would mean something, but that’s not the message I got back. They wouldn’t even agree to basic maternal protections in my contract — so I walked. What choice did I have? 

So there I was: Newly postpartum, in training for Tokyo, and in the market for a new sponsor. And again, I figured my résumé would make this last part relatively easy. Turns out backing “mom me” was a different proposition, and not one of the big footwear brands was interested in it. They said it was because I was so heavily associated with Nike, but I think it’s reasonable to assume other forces were at play. It would be easy to say Nike was the big bad guy, but really the issue of maternal equality in professional sport is a systemic issue. This was the culture of pregnancy for women in track and field. I had watched many teammates and colleagues not be supported through their pregnancies.

My brother Wes, who is also my business manager, was the first to suggest that maybe rather than sitting around waiting for someone to choose us, we ourselves could make a choice, and that’s what we did. The plan, at first, was to create the shoe that I would run in for the Tokyo Olympics, but the more research we did, the more we realized this was another example of a systemic shortcoming. Turns out the vast majority of high-performance footwear in the world has been designed around a male foot. I started thinking about what it would mean to create a brand that was made with women at the center, and that became Saysh.

We launched at the Olympic trials for Tokyo. It was really funny because there was quite a bit of interest around what shoes I would be wearing. I had written my op-ed in the New York Times at this point, so my story was out there, and all eyes were on me or, more specifically, on my feet. People on Twitter were trying to figure out whose shoe I was wearing, and I can’t tell you how good it felt that the answer was: my own. 

I grew up dreaming of running in the Olympics, but never did dream of being an entrepreneur, running my own business. Saysh was a company born out of necessity: I wasn’t going to run barefoot! But today, I see how fate was conspiring in my favor. 

So often athletes are left struggling to figure out their identity after retirement. Nobody talks about how difficult it is to devote your whole self to this singular achievement, and then be expected to just turn it off. Having Saysh has given me a channel for so much of that competitive energy, and a strong sense of purpose. A lot of the skills I developed over decades as an athlete are pretty transferable. 

You think the Olympic trials are a pressure cooker? Try pitching your product to a room full of white men. I can remember one particular guy who said, “Oh, these are great, I’ll have my daughter try them out.” Because there was not a single woman on their team to do that. 

Ultimately, we were able to secure funding by connecting with a firm that understood our mission, a woman-led fund called IRIS Ventures. But I value that time I spent — often as the only woman, and always as the only woman of color — in the room because it just underscores what we’re doing. We named our company Saysh after a kind of wave that exists in enclosed bodies of water. When atmospheric pressure brings the water to one side, it’s the Saysh that restores balance, and that’s what I want to be from a gender perspective. 

As an Olympian, I always had tangible and clearly defined goals: faster/slower, wins/losses. The rest of the world isn’t quite so definitive, and so I am learning to look at success in terms of impact, whether that is Saysh’s maternity returns policy, which we introduced in 2022 (pregnant women often experience a change in shoe size, so Saysh offers free exchanges), or the work I am doing with Melinda Gates’ foundation to improve Black maternal healthcare, or the nursery at the Paris games. 

During my first year competing with my daughter, it was difficult traveling overseas with an infant, breastfeeding in stadium bathrooms, and being assigned a roommate at the World Championships. I was grateful to have the resources to bring my partner or mom to help me with childcare, but I realize that is a luxury many athletes don’t have, and that has motivated my work for female athletes with children.

I can’t imagine what it would have meant to me to arrive at my last games with my daughter, and to have a space where I could actually feel supported. It’s a practical measure, but it’s also about sending a message: You can be a mom and be at the very top of your game. I want women to know they don’t have to choose.