Athlete. Mother. Activist.

By USC Athletics Black History Month

February 22^nd, 2020

One-year-old Camryn has traveled to every track & field meet with her mom. She’s watched her win races, come up short in others and train lights-out. She knows what hard work looks like, what it takes to shatter a record and how shiny medals are.

Her mom, Allyson Felix, is the most decorated female track & field athlete in history. Felix competed in her first Olympic Games in Athens at 18 years old and finished second in the 200-meter race. While earning her degree from USC, she became the youngest champion to compete at World Championships and prepared for her second Olympics in Beijing, where she grabbed her first gold in the women’s 4x400m relay.

Four years later, Felix earned three gold medals in London, including a 4x100m relay that set a world record in 40.82 seconds. The nine-time Olympic medalist is the only female track & field athlete to win six golds in her career.

This past September, Camryn watched as her mom earned her 12th World Championship gold medal to pass sprinter Usain Bolt for most World medals. Felix had given birth just about 10 months before, in an emergency C-section. When concerns arose during a routine checkup at 32 weeks, Felix was immediately sent to the hospital and diagnosed with severe preeclampsia, causing her to deliver a three-pound baby girl two days later.

After Felix herself recovered, she and her husband, Kenneth Ferguson, stood by their daughter’s side for 29 days as she fought for her life in NICU.

“She’s really given me a different motivation,” Felix said of Camryn. “I’ve always been driven by my goals and winning, but now there’s definitely been a shift. It’s more of wanting to show her [how to] overcome adversity, have character and integrity. I’m thinking more about the message I want to send to her.”

Most importantly to Felix, her daughter has witnessed her find her voice and use it to advocate for what’s right.

Felix had been sponsored by sportswear company Nike since 2010, but when her contract ended in December 2017, she spent a year and a half trying to negotiate a renewal. Nike wanted to pay the six-time Olympic gold medalist less than her previous contract and couldn’t promise that she wouldn’t be punished for not performing at her very best during and after pregnancy.

Meanwhile, USA dominated in the 2019 World Cup, and Nike’s commercial supporting the women went viral.

“I felt like I couldn’t stay silent any longer, because it just didn’t seem right to me,” Felix said. “What I was experiencing and what I was seeing, it wasn’t matching up, and I just felt like I could not go along with it.”

Felix recognized the gravity of her position to take on a powerful issue that affects not only female athletes but all women.

The New York Times published Felix’s op-ed in May, detailing her struggles with Nike’s maternity policies.

“It was extremely scary and risky, just for my whole career path,” Felix said. “But it just felt like it was necessary.”

No other offer sat on Felix’s table. For all she knew, she could run unsponsored for the rest of her career. But making the world a better place for Camryn, her daughter, remained more important than money and a logo.

“I think previously it just wasn’t comfortable for me to come out and really have big opinions on various things. By having [Camryn] and especially being the mother of a daughter, it really hits home. What’s not right needs to be spoken on, and even if change doesn’t come much further down the line, I just want to do everything I can to be a part of it,” Felix said.

Felix’s advocacy led Nike to change its maternity policy in the following months to increase pregnant athletes’ financial protection to 18 months. But Felix had already moved on. Athleta, a women’s sportswear company owned by Gap, had seen her op-ed and reached out. Its mission to empower women and girls through sport aligned perfectly with what Felix is all about. In what she described as a “seamless connection” with the company, she became its first sponsored athlete.

“It was definitely uncharted territory, but it was exciting to me,” Felix said. “I wanted to do something different. I wanted to show that you didn’t have to go through traditional channels. I was really up for a change.”

Athleta proudly announced their partnership by summing up the World Champion with three words: “Athlete. Mother. Activist.”

Felix has always been an athlete. But after becoming a mother and spending a month in NICU, she naturally took on the role of an activist.

“I learned that my story was not so uncommon,” Felix said in May during her testimony in front of Congress, where she sat amongst health professionals from all over the country to discuss racial disparities in maternal mortality. “There were others like me — just like me. Black like me, healthy like me, doing their best, just like me. They faced death like me too.”

She shared that black women are four times more likely to die from childbirth than white mothers, and that they suffer from complications twice as often. But she never thought it could be her — a six-time Olympic gold medalist with all the resources available to her for a healthy pregnancy.

“That is what the issue is,” Felix said. “It doesn’t matter if you are privileged, if you come from a less advantaged background or don’t have good healthcare. These issues affect all black women. Even Serena Williams and Beyoncé.

“I know that we need to be prepared and educated to be able to go into a doctors office and advocate for our own health, ask questions, know what to look for. Those are things that I hope to raise more awareness about.”

While fighting for gender and racial equality, Felix is still training relentlessly. She’s right where she wants to be with the Olympic Trials coming up in June, and her sights are set on adding a couple Tokyo medals to the collection that’s kept at her parents’ house for them to show off to friends and guests.