Everywhere at these Olympics, athlete moms are shattering a tired sports myth

· Yahoo Sports

MILAN — This has been the most gender equitable Olympics yet.

It’s no surprise then that these Milan Cortina Games, which may be remembered for a lot of reasons, should go down in history for one very specific reason: This one was for the moms.

Visit fishroad-app.com for more information.

Female athletes have been participating in the Olympics since 1900, originally in a few hand-picked sports that were deemed by men to be socially acceptable. It’s taken more than a century for women who chipped away at the narrative, who pushed boundaries and held their ground, to obliterate the last inane competitive shackle: starting a family.

This wasn’t the first time Olympic athletes returned to compete as mothers. Track star Allyson Felix, soccer’s Alex Morgan, tennis legend Naomi Osaka and others before them did what great athletes often do. They challenged antiquated notions and pushed the door open. The Milan Cortina Games just blew it open.

You couldn’t tune in on a TV, tablet or phone over the past few weeks without seeing an Olympic mother do something incredible.

There was Italian speedskater Francesca Lollobrigida, who won gold in the 3,000-meter race on her birthday and grabbed her 2-year-old son, Tommaso, to celebrate. She won gold again in the 5,000-meter and brought Tommaso to the news conference, publicly juggling both her worlds on sport’s biggest stage.

Bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor, mother to Nico and Noah, already was the most decorated Black athlete in Winter Games history. Taylor then won the gold that had eluded her for 16 years and credited, of all things, motherhood.

She thanked her nanny. She hugged her teammate, Kaillie Armbruster Humphries, who won bronze and woke up her 15-month-old, Aulden, to celebrate.

There was skeleton athlete Kelly Curtis, mom of 2-year-old Maeve, and curling sisters Tabitha and Tara Peterson, who both had children between the Beijing and Milan Games.

On Thursday, Tabitha delivered the final stone to send the U.S. out of round-robin play for the first time in two decades.

That same day, in another cluster in northern Italy, hockey player Kendall Coyne Schofield did what she had seen Jenny Potter do back in 2010: put a medal on her son’s neck.

When Schofield first announced she was pregnant, people assumed the baby announcement was also a retirement one. How sweet it was, then, to hang the gold on Drew, who was born in 2023.

It shouldn’t be 16 years before we see another mom put a gold around their son’s neck.

Gone are the days when women had to choose motherhood or a career in sports, and good riddance.

I’m not an Olympian, but when I started thinking about having a family, as a woman who primarily reports on baseball and its grueling 162-game schedule, I had no peers.

Every woman I knew who traveled and covered baseball full-time and wanted a family had changed jobs, because wasn’t that the gig? You couldn’t have it all.

I did it anyway, not because I was particularly brave, but because I didn’t want to leave a career I loved. I had just been promoted in 2021. My first son was born in 2022. I had a second in 2025. At least three other women who cover baseball are now moms.

Is it tough? Yes. Impossible? Hardly. Starting a family isn’t the end of your career, no matter your profession.

Kirsty Coventry, elected the first female president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in March 2025, campaigned for the role while pregnant with her second child. She often brought her newborn to meetings. NBC broadcasters Maria Taylor and Tara Lipinski have been incredibly open on social media as they work, toddlers in tow, to chronicle the biggest sporting event in the world.

It was Lipinski who posted a photo of her daughter, Georgie, on her shoulders, walking to a park in Milan. The caption started with six powerful words: “Maybe I don’t want to choose.”

“I wasn’t defending myself,” Lipinski later told me. “I was so joyful to call a skating event and come back and go to the park with my daughter and have those moments collide. I feel so lucky and grateful that I’m able to do it, to show my daughter to reach for her dreams while continuing to chase mine.”

Isn’t that what we loved so much about Milan? That every Olympic mom had the same message: It is possible.

Isn’t that how you turn a dream into reality? Believing in the notion that we can push past our limits and somehow be even greater? That is motherhood.

What we should remember about these Olympics is that millions of girls and young women are watching in awe and seeing this message loud and clear: You can have it all. The career. The family.

And you can have it whenever you want. Lollobrigida is 35. Elana Meyers Taylor is 41.

If there’s another indelible image of this year’s female Olympians — who have been told their whole lives in a million different ways that they’re no good past a certain age — it’s that they took a blowtorch to another long-held social norm. Women don’t peak in their 20s.

Eleven years ago, Alpine skier Sarah Schleper — who has represented the U.S. in four Olympics and Mexico in the past three — carried her 3-year-old son down a slalom course. She was the only mom on the World Cup tour.

More than 14 years later, Schleper competed with her son, Lasse Gaxiola, to become the first mother-son duo to compete at the Olympics. She turned 47 on Thursday. The only thing going downhill is Schleper’s skis, at speeds that would make most men half her age uncomfortable.

“I think part of being courageous is facing your fears and doing it anyway,” she said.

Amen.

In four or eight or even 12 years, we’ll look back at the athletes we saw and the other women they inspired and wonder why anyone ever thought women couldn’t have children and be Olympians or broadcasters or the head of the IOC.

It will be so commonplace we won’t think to mention it, like we rarely do with their male counterparts. For now, though, we still need that spotlight if only to remind everyone of a simple truth.

“When it’s not done, and you’re the first, it’s like, ‘Is it OK?'” Lipinski said. “It’s nice when you realize I can do it, too. I can do it all. Moms can do it all.

“This is just the beginning of what’s to come.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Sports Business, Olympics, Global Sports, Women's Olympics

2026 The Athletic Media Company

Read full story at source