By JOCELYN NOVECK PARIS (AP) — Many Olympic athletes take to Instagram to share news of their exploits, trials, victories and heartbreaks. After her fencing event ended last week, Egypt’s Nada Hafez shared a little bit more. She’d been fencing for two, the athlete revealed — and in fact had been pregnant for seven months.
“What appears to you as two players on the podium, they were actually three!” Hafez wrote, under an emotional picture of her during the match. “It was me, my competitor, & my yet-to-come to our world, little baby!” Mom (and baby) finished the competition ranked 16th, Hafez’s best result in three Olympics. A day later, an Azerbaijani archer was also revealed on Instagram to have competed while six-and-a-half months pregnant.
Yaylagul Ramazanova told Xinhua News she’d felt her baby kick before she took a shot — and then shot a 10, the maximum number of points. There have been pregnant Olympians and Paralympians before, though the phenomenon is rare for obvious reasons. Still, most stories have been of athletes competing when they’re far earlier in their pregnancies — or not even far enough along to know they were expecting.
Like U.S. beach volleyball star Kerri Walsh Jennings, who won her third gold medal while, unknowingly, five weeks pregnant with her third child.
“When I was throwing my body around fearlessly, and going for gold for our country, I was pregnant,” she said on “Today” after the London Games in 2012. She and hu.