Olympian Mothers Find Support in Paris 2024 Nursery and MOMentum Initiative
When Nikkita Holder, a two-time Olympic hurdler and mother, heard about the upcoming private children’s nursery at the Paris 2024 Olympic village, she was overcome with emotion. “To have that would have been tremendously amazing,” said Holder, whose final race was in 2018. “It’s exciting to know that women can now have a dream and still be a mom at the same time.”
Holder’s experience is not unique. While the addition of a nursery at the Games is a welcome sign of progress, many women athletes continue to face a lack of support, resources, and funding during their family planning and motherhood years.
To address this issue, a group of equity-seeking Olympians have come together to create MOMentum, an online platform that provides resources and support for athletes navigating pregnancy, postpartum recovery, egg freezing, IVF, carding policy updates, and legal assistance. With the help of the OLY Canada Legacy Grant, MOMentum was founded by Canadian lightweight double sculls rower Jill Moffatt and a team of fellow athletes.
“When it comes to every National Sport Organization, it’s very wild west,” Moffatt said. “A big thing that we see in the research and experiences is there is not a lot of information on what the best practices are.”
MOMentum aims to fill this gap by centralizing resources and providing peer-to-peer connections. Athletes like wrestler Erica Wiebe, a Rio 2016 gold medalist, have shared their experiences with egg freezing on social media, helping to normalize the conversation around women’s health.
“I think there’s lots of aspects around women’s health that are just as poorly understood, and then even more poorly shared and communicated,” Wiebe said. “And so I think normalizing the experience, and being open with it to bring awareness for other women, especially with high-performance female athletes, is really important.”
MOMentum is also working toward providing grants to athletes to cover costs associated with bringing their children to the Games. “Financial burden is a massive barrier,” Moffatt said. “So being able to reduce that stress around major Games would be ideal for us.”
The movement towards better support for women athletes is growing, and Olympians like Holder are hopeful for the future. “It makes me want to go put my spikes back on and come out,” said Holder, who is now a mother of two and an entrepreneur. “The future is female.”
