Last year, the athlete opened up to Katie about her emergency delivery and what she wants other women to know.
Allyson Felix has returned to the Olympics for a fifth time.
She’s competing in the 400-meter after finishing second at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials for track and field last month with a season-best time of 50.02 seconds. She also is a member of the relay pool and could run on the 4-x-400 meter relay and 4-x-400 meter mixed relay.
If she wins one medal, the Olympic sprinter could make history, becoming the most decorated female Olympic track and field athlete ever. If she wins two medals, Felix would have the most medals out of anyone in U.S. Olympic track and field history.
Clearly, Felix isn’t slowing down.
And while this isn’t the nine-time Olympic medalist’s first rodeo, this will be a first in one way: This will be her first Olympic Games since becoming a mom in 2018.
Felix’s daughter, Camryn, 2, was cheering her mom on at the trials and greeted her right after.
Not only will Tokyo mark Felix’s first Olympics since becoming a mother, it’s also her first Olympics since surviving a life-threatening delivery.
In 2018, Felix became one of the 50,000 women who nearly die from pregnancy-related complications.
Last year, Felix opened up to Katie about her experience on Next Question with Katie Couric.
“I had a really great pregnancy,” she told Katie. “I knew I wanted to come back to compete…so I was pretty much training four, five days a week. I was on the track, in the gym, in the pool, really intentional with the idea that I was going to resume back on the track,” she recalled. Unknowingly, however, her body had different plans. “At 32 weeks, I went to the doctor and I was just going for my routine checkup and went in, and immediately found out that I was spilling protein. And from there my doctor sent me straight to the hospital for further monitoring, and it was not going well.” She was admitted right away and spent the night in the hospital. “That’s when things really started to go downhill,” she recalled. “I was diagnosed with a severe case of preeclampsia. My blood pressure was through the roof, and the baby was not doing well and things happened just so quickly.”
As she was trying to grasp what was going on with her body, things got worse and she was informed that “the only way out of it was to have an emergency C-section and to deliver.”
What made the situation worse was that doctors hadn’t prepared her for the possibility. “I wasn’t told what to look out for, I wasn’t told I was at risk.” She feels if she had been more informed, she would have been more equipped to wrap her head around what was happening.
According to the Agency for Healthcare Research, Black women are at least 50 percent more likely to experience pre-eclampsia than white women, and the effects are also more severe and present earlier than in other races.
“Just being a Black woman, that made me at risk. And that is something that I didn’t understand before,” she told Katie.
“But I’m a professional athlete, I train for a living, I’m healthy, I know how to eat right, I exercised throughout my pregnancy and I was wanting to have this beautiful natural birth. And so I just didn’t think it would be me and that is just such a misconception that I want to bring awareness to, that women of color are at risk.”
She believes there might have been some “implicit bias” going on in her doctors’ appointments. “Every woman of color immediately should be sat down and explained that this is something you’re at risk for,” she said.
Luckily, Felix and Camryn had a strong support system and resources that helped them come out of this experience healthy, and she knows that if that weren’t the case, things could have gone differently for her.
That has led her to advocacy, and she’s been outspoken ever since. “Going through this experience and just feeling so scared as I went through it all, that was really the turning point for me, and talking to girlfriends and just feeling like, my friends aren’t even educated on this topic, it really pushed me to share my story.”
