Olympian gold medalist Allyson Felix built her career on speed and precision. Throughout her years on the track, she has redefined what it means to push harder, stay disciplined, and win. But the most important moments of her story came when she stepped off the track and chose to challenge the systems around her. Now, in our Run With Purpose series, she is turning that experience into conversations about courage and integrity.
Elite female athletes can face career penalties for choosing to have children
Felix always knew she wanted to have a family, but she had never seen a woman in her sport openly celebrated for both competing at the highest level and being a mother. With 11 Olympic medals and 20 World Athletics Championships medals under her belt — the most of any athlete ever, male or female — Felix was a star, with the sponsorships to match.
But when she wanted to start a family, it became clear her sponsor Nike did not want to fully support one of its most decorated athletes. This mirrors broader patterns across women’s sport — the systemic barriers holding women athletes back — where motherhood, injury, or advocacy can still trigger financial penalties.
“I never saw a woman who was celebrated in my sport who was still having a family and doing both,” she says in the Run With Purpose conversations. “It wasn't that it wasn't happening, but those stories weren’t being told. I had a lot of fear around starting a family and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be supported through that.”
During contract negotiations, Nike offered her a pay cut since she would not be yielding the same results post-partum as before. Along with other female athletes, Felix campaigned to adjust the brand’s maternal policies to ensure salary protections for athletes before and after giving birth. Within weeks, maternity protection policies were rewritten.
Exposing the crisis in maternal healthcare
It was not the only challenge on her path. During her pregnancy, she was diagnosed with severe preeclampsia, a potentially life-threatening condition. Felix had to deliver her daughter early and spent a month in the neonatal intensive care unit. The experience exposed a deeper issue: Black women are far more likely to face serious complications in childbirth, with medical professionals spending less time with them, underestimating their pain, and ignoring their symptoms. Living through such a scary emergency strengthened Felix’s resolve to use her platform to speak up. “That entire experience just opened my eyes to this crisis that we’re facing in maternal health,” she says. “It made me want to figure out what can I do about this.”
How a gap in women’s footwear design led to an innovative new brand
The experience also shaped how she approached competition. In a sport where she knew the playing field was not always level, she set her own standard. While preparing for her fifth Olympic Games, she found herself without a footwear partner and, at one point, without shoes to compete in. What began as a practical problem exposed something bigger: most performance footwear was not designed for women.
This reflects a broader commercial shift: women’s sport is becoming a powerful growth engine and brands that ignore women are increasingly being left behind.
Rather than wait for that to change, Felix decided to build something different. Together with her brother Wes, she co-founded Saysh, a brand shaped by her own experience and focused on designing products for women from the start. “In the sneaker world, there really are not shoes made for women,” she explains. “We were the first company to market that said, ‘This is all we do — make sneakers based on women’s feet.’”
Looking across her career, the pattern is clear. Felix does not wait for systems to catch up. She acts when something does not feel right, whether that means speaking up or building something new.
A version of this story was originally published in December 2022.