At the beginning of her cycling career, Dame Laura Kenny, Britain's most successful female and the only woman to have won four titles at the Games, was conditioned to believe that, if she wanted to be a mother, she would pay the price professionally. ‘It was an unwritten rule that you just didn’t have a child,’ Kenny tells ELLE UK. ‘The message was that if you had a child, it was like you were giving up.
I always thought you had to choose. I always thought you had to choose your career or starting your family.' The turning point for Kenny's thoughts on motherhood came when fellow British Olympian Jessica Ennis Hill gave birth to her first child in 2014 amid fevered speculation that her becoming a mother was a sign she was quitting her sport.
Just nine months later, however, Ennis Hill proved her detractors wrong and won a gold medal in the heptathlon in Beijing, completing a remarkable comeback to elite competition. ‘From the outside world, it just looked like she was going to quit so close to the Olympics and it was sort of a question of “Why would she do that [have a child?]”,' Kenny explains. Three years after watching new mother Ennis Hill being awarded gold in Beijing, the cyclist gave birth to her first child, one year after she won gold for the second time in Rio in 2016.
This year’s , which its organisers hope will be the first gender-balanced in history, is making accommodations with Olympian mothers in mind. This year is the first time that the Olymp.