Episode 1780 - Supportive steps: how the Olympics champion moms

Dr. Rachel Moore // #ICEPelvic // www.ptonice.com 

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, ICE Pelvic faculty member Rachel Moore highlights the ways the 2024 Paris Olympics are changing the narrative around motherhood for athletes and providing resources and support along the way

Take a listen to learn how to better serve this population of patients & athletes or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog.

If you're looking to learn more about our live pregnancy and postpartum physical therapy courses or our online physical therapy courses, check our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab.

Are you looking for more information on how to keep lifting weights while pregnant? Check out the ICE Pelvic bi-weekly newsletter!

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

RACHEL MOOREGuys, good morning. My name is Dr. Rachel Moore. I am here this morning representing the pelvic crew and I am so excited to talk to you guys about the Olympics and some pretty big stuff that's going on in the Olympics this year. The Olympics is huge in my area. Simone Biles actually lives like five minutes away from me, which is like my claim to fame humble brag. My daughter went to her gymnastics gym. And so if you've seen the Simone Biles documentary that's on Netflix, We were like fangirling and fanboying. We were watching it because we're like, oh, that's where Libby does gymnastics. So Olympics are a pretty big thing in our area, in our neck of the woods. And I think the Olympics this year are really interesting. And I wanted to get on this morning to highlight some of the things, especially when it comes to women in sport. that are really kind of setting apart this Olympics from ones in the past. If you didn't catch it, the opening ceremony was on Friday. It was a really interesting one because they were just kind of doing this parade of river boats down the river. And they incorporated all of these architectural pieces of France architecture into the opening ceremony. So it was pretty interesting to watch. And it just kind of set the tone for how different this year's Olympics are from a lot of the other Olympics in the past. So one of the key things that I think is really interesting, and I didn't even realize this until somebody else on faculty had shared a story about this, is that this is the first Olympics that has been almost equal representation as far as genders go. So the IOC set out to have a goal to have 50-50 participation between male athletes and female athletes. for this year's Olympics. And they actually just barely fell short of that goal. So the way it shook out with the amount of athletes that showed up and qualified and came to the Olympics was 51% male, 49% female. But that's pretty wild to see almost equal representation at this competition on a global level. A lot of us in the ice world are involved in CrossFit. We're kind of used to seeing that 50-50 representation. And that's one thing that really makes CrossFit unique compared to a lot of other sporting organizations. And so it's cool to see this transition or start seeing this change in this shift towards women in sport take this like worldwide platform where it's not a male-dominated thing and we're seeing more females represented and within that we're seeing more women that have children represented so motherhood is really starting to take a front row seat to the Olympics. So Allison Felix, who is the most decorated female track and field athlete, she's a US athlete. She actually made headlines a while ago because she lost her sponsorship with Nike when she told them that she was pregnant. And so that was this huge shakeup as far as women athletes and females in sport of, we are not a liability when we're pregnant. We're not less than because we choose to have children. And a lot of women, we see this a lot where People are delaying having children because of this athletic window and this fertility window kind of overlapping And so when athletes decide to start their families and then there's this response where they get dropped in their sponsorships, that sends us a certain message about what a female's role is and what her worth is in sport when she becomes a mother. And so Alice and Felix really spoke out against this and started this really amazing conversation about this overlap and about maternity leave and about just female in sport and how motherhood fits into that role. She took this to the Olympics this year. Um, so she's at athlete representative for the IOC and she actually started an initiative and it did great. And it's a thing now to open a nursery for mothers with young children at the Olympics. So historically the way it's always shook out in the past is that children are not allowed in the athlete village where athletes and coaches stay for the duration of the competition. So if somebody was breastfeeding a baby and also competing at the Olympics, they either had to choose to be separated from their baby for the duration of that competition, or they would have to kind of foot the cost of lodging for themselves. The problem with that is that Olympics is expensive and not everybody has the funds to even go compete at the Olympics. But then if we're thinking that somebody qualifies for the Olympics and now they have to pay for a caregiver maybe for their child and also they have to pay for lodging for their child or they're not going to be able to To be there that could make somebody not go to the Olympics that had qualified and had earned their spot So it's pretty cool to see this shift start happening. The nursery is actually sponsored by Procter & Gamble So Pampers is like branded all over it it's kind of funny if you look at pictures because they literally put Pampers and like every square inch that they possibly could and But it's a really exciting thing. So it's for children that are diaper age and below and their parents and their caregivers can go and kind of get away from the chaos of everything that's happening at the Olympics and have a quiet space to be together to spend time together. to bond. And then really a big thing is to nurse. The Tokyo Olympics, the last summer Olympics that we had, was right in the kind of height of the pandemic, or I guess kind of the downhill trickling of the pandemic, if you guys remember. And there was a lot of restrictions on the athletes. And so the athletes weren't allowed to bring support people, families, people had to stay behind. They were traveling with this like skeleton crew. And IOC The mothers to spend time with their children and to be able to nurse was Honestly pretty laughable. It was pretty wild if you if you just google like tokyo nursing room olympics Um, there's a picture of one of the athletes like two-year-olds laying on the floor And there's like a folding table with two folding chairs next to it And that's where the athletes would go To spend time with their children in between their events when they weren't training or they weren't preparing for the games again, if we're thinking about the message this sends that really tells people like you're here to be an athlete and everything else doesn't matter like we don't care that you also might be a mom oh it's it's okay you need a space well here's this like folding chair in the corner that message is so different this year the message the ioc is sending this year is that we recognize that the maternal timeline and the athletic timeline might overlap and your worth is not only as an athlete and we recognize that your worth also exists in motherhood. Allison Felix had this really cool quote. She said, I think it really tells women that you can choose motherhood and also be at the top of your game and not have to miss a beat. That's amazing. We preach that all the time in our division. We talk a lot, again, about how the fertility window and the athletic window overlap. And what we're starting to see is this trend of women pushing back and saying, yes, we can still be athletic. Yes, we can still be in the top of our sport. and also show up for our families, and also feed our babies, and us be their primary source of nutrition while we're training for the Olympics. So it's really cool to see this take, again, a worldwide platform to acknowledge that these things can exist at the same time. There's a couple other countries and groups that are showing up for their athletes as well. So the French Olympic Committee is actually paying for hotel rooms for their breastfeeding mothers. to stay in so again before athletes would stay in the athlete village with their coaches partners and babies would stay elsewhere they couldn't go spend the night with them they had to be in the athlete village so the french olympic committee this year has started an initiative where they're paying for hotel rooms for nursing mothers where they can go spend the night with their baby their partner can be there as well so kind of minimizing this interruption between this mother-baby bond and what's really cool is that they made a statement that this isn't just because quote-