A track and field legend and advocate for athlete mothers, AllysonFelix is SI's 2022 Muhammad Ali Legacy Award winner:
revealed how Alysia Montaño, an Olympian in the 800 meters, had left Nike in ’13 because the company told her that if she got pregnant, it would pause her contract until she could race again. Her next sponsor, Asics, also threatened to stop paying her after she had her daughter in ’14. Kara Goucher, another Olympian, told thethat Nike had stopped paying her when her son was born in ’10, until she began competing again.
“It was so outside of my comfort zone. I’m a person who is shy by nature and I don’t like to rock the boat. So it was really, really difficult to be able to find that place to come forward and to share what had been going on,” she says.
Montaño was surprised when she read about Felix’s contract struggles. She’d assumed Felix, with all her medals and marketing potential, would “have all the support in the world.” When Montaño came forward, she had no sponsor and hadn’t run competitively in two years. “I shared because I had nothing to lose,” she says.
“[Saysh] exists because I believe that women deserve better,” Felix says. As she dove into the details of manufacturing, Felix was astounded to find out that most athletic sneakers are made based on the mold of a man’s foot, whether they’re marketed as men’s or women’s. The Saysh One, the company’s first lifestyle sneaker, was specifically designed to fit a woman’s foot and launched in September 2021. Saysh’s first running and training shoes are expected in ’23.
Goucher says runners who are also mothers have been portrayed differently since Felix began her advocacy. “When I had my son, it was almost like I had to prove that I didn’t have a kid. The message was: ‘Don’t be a mom when you’re out running.’” Now, she says: “There’s moms on the track with their babies, and it’s looked at as a human enhancer, rather than an athletic disadvantage.”
Felix says since the beginning of speaking up, she’s done this work for—and with—her peers and those who came before her. “It makes me so excited when I see so many women having children, coming back to sport [and] being supported. That’s what this has all been about.”
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