Think being an Olympian is hard? Try doing it as a new mother

The day before her son was born, three weeks earlier, she thought about how her body was reacting. Olympian parents do not receive a guide outlining the emotional or financial support they can expect. Caldwell didn’t know of a group chat for athletes who were masters of their sport but new to parenting.

She wondered whether her sponsors, coaches or the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee would view her as diminished, a concern that was not unprecedented. A former professional runner once called getting pregnant “the kiss of death for a female athlete.” In 2019, Olympic sprinter Allyson Felix wrote that her sponsor, Nike, offered to pay her 70% less after giving birth. The outcry led the company to change its maternity policy for Olympic athletes.

For advice, Caldwell spoke often with Faye Gulini, an American snowboarder and four-time Olympian who lives less than a mile away. Gulini, 33, had given birth to her second child just three weeks before Caldwell, and she was also considering whether to attempt an Olympic comeback in Milan Cortina.

“The very reason I thought I was done snowboarding and having kids and starting a family was the very reason I wanted to come back,” Gulini said. “It was no longer about me and my journey. It was about us and our journey and what I could teach them and show them and experience with them. And that gave me so much motivation to try – for them.”

When the Olympics opening ceremony begins on Feb. 6, several new mothers could be part of Team USA, such as Jamie Anderson, one of the most decorated snowboarders in U.S. history and a two-time Olympic gold medalist, who gave birth to her second child in April.

Less than 16 months after Meghan Daniel gave birth to her son, a son, she is now trying to qualify for what would be her third Olympics for Team USA in snowboard cross.

When the U.S. Snowboard Team held a training camp in Argentina in October, Daniel made the solo trip to attempt his first outing on a boardercross course since fall 2022 — before he had kids — while his family stayed in another hemisphere, near Park City. The distance was necessary because her husband cannot work remotely internationally, she said. It was Daniel’s third two-week trip away from her family for training camp, and she described feelings of guilt related to his absence. But while she was in Argentina preparing for her “nerve-wracking” trip, Daniel received a text from her husband with a video of their 2-year-old daughter.

“She said to me, ‘Good luck, Mom.’ And, oh, my God, that gave me the most motivation possible,” Daniel said. “It was the cutest thing. I just feel motivated by them and completely different than how I felt or felt before I had kids.”

Caldwell was motivated to start a family nearly two years ago, but she said she was sensitive to the fact that although her career was well established, her husband, who at 27 is five years younger, was just entering his prime and didn’t feel ready. After learning she was pregnant, she was hesitant to share the news, fearing that getting pregnant would create a stigma: How patient would sponsors or coaches be while waiting for her return to the slopes?

As her due date approached, Caldwell began to reconsider, from a parental perspective, the choices she and her parents had made to enable her to pursue a career. Would she have let her child leave home at 13 to train? (Maybe not, she said.) Did she still think the physical risks of her sport were worth it? (Even.)

Training as an elite athlete is, according to Caldwell, “such a selfish endeavor; everything you do 100 percent of the time is about performance. And when you have kids, that’s not really feasible.”

Yet those choices had also led her to a career that she hoped would serve as an example for her child to boldly pursue her dream, and competing just seven months postpartum could continue the overarching theme of her career, she thought.

“It’s women’s empowerment,” she said. “That’s been my thing throughout my career, is you can push the boundaries of what people expect.”

She was still determining her own limits. The difference between holding one gold medal, starting in 2022, and potentially adding a second was not so great that it would motivate her to qualify for Milan Cortina alone, she said. Her first priority was to give birth to a healthy son and emerge healthy herself, she said, and yet she couldn’t completely turn off her competitive instinct either. By July, she had set out her breastfeeding schedule for the next six months, to coincide with the opening ceremony.

“I’ve been to the last four” Olympics, she said. “If I’m not here at the next one, I’ll be like, what the hell? »

“Come back,” Schoenefeld replied, “when you’re 36.”

“I just kind of have to find that happy balance.”

After Gulini returned from the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, she and her husband decided the time was right to try for children.

In early 2023, Gulini was pregnant with a son. She expected this season to be her last before retiring, but she was ready to call it quits after learning she was pregnant — until her obstetrician told her it was safe to continue competing.