Alternating elite sport with being a mother is not an easy task for athletes today. Under this pretext, the Maternity and Sport Commission of the Spanish Olympic Committee held its usual constitutive meeting this Wednesday for the 2023-2025 cycle, coinciding with the Working Women’s Day. In said session, the working bases were laid and the different lines of action to follow were discussed in the event that an athlete was forced to stop competing due to a pregnancy.
This organization is directed by the Olympic medalist Ona Carbonell and some of the points that were discussed are of great relevance for women’s sports today. One of them is the preparation of athletes who are going through a pregnancy or who are in the postpartum process, something that logically prevents them from perform at the highest level while they are in full gestation or living the first days of their baby. At the same time, they wanted to give importance to the closeness of the athletes to their breastfeeding children and a series of initiatives were proposed that are aimed at reconciling between both worlds.
Actually, the main objective of this Commission is the construction of an informative reference center on “Maternity and Sport” that has the contribution of professionals from the sector in order to advise and guide athletes during the maternity period. This meeting was joined by personalities such as Alexander White, the president of the Spanish Olympic Committeeand athletes such as canoeists Teresa Portela and Maialen Chourraut.
For some time now, the EOC It has been committed to achieving coexistence between sporting life and motherhood and the intention of the promoter of the Olympic movement is none other than to guarantee the safety of women athletes by combining something as natural as being a mother and elite sport.
