For elite women in sport, becoming a mother can still mean the end of a career. Despite progress at the top level, pregnancy exposes deep structural inequalities that leave many athletes without pay, protection or a path back.
Although the 2024 Olympics was the first gender-equal Games in terms of participation, as early as 2025, less than half of all International Federations had developed policies to support pregnant and parenting athletes.
Few policies cover the range of biological, psychological, and social support needed by women athletes and gender inequities remain deeply entrenched across all levels of sport.
Dr Kelly Massey, former Relay Medalist and Senior Lecturer at Liverpool’s John Moores University, talks about the challenges elite female athletes face when pregnant and how to overcome them.
“The biggest challenge facing pregnant women in sport is their body,” Dr Massey says. “They’re so in tune with their body, then during pregnancy the athletes are no longer able to control their body and move it in the same way.
“This is a question of identity and negotiation. They have to release and reduce part of their athlete identity to make space for this mother identity, because a lot of athlete identity is that physical element.
“Your body’s a tool to perform your body’s potentially your money-maker.”
Athlete identity is all-encompassing and ‘normal’ life has to be sacrificed.
“The social construction around sacrifice is predominantly that single identity, life choices, life decisions, where you live, work, eat, socialise, all of those questions are answered by, ‘how will it impact my training?”
“When deciding to become a mother, athletes often face a ‘crisis narrative’ because the default position was always to wait until retirement,” she says.
However, now that more athletes are extending their careers, often reaching their peak during their most fertile years, Dr Massey argues that, ironically, having a child earlier in life would be easier for your body to recover and give you longer to continue your career afterwards.
However, some things have changed in recent years, but mainly at the elite level.
The National Governing Bodies (NGBs) are independent organisations where athletes can get funding support. Sponsored athletes have instant care available if they are injured.
“If I had an injury and needed a scan, they’d put me in that day,” says Dr Massey.
NGBs are also required to provide a pregnancy support plan covering training, communication and a return to sport pathway, but the quality varies from sport to sport.
An issue that elite women athletes face in the UK are usually self‑employed, which means no statutory maternity pay, no legal protection from discrimination, and no guaranteed right to return.
Their financial security rests instead on UK Sport’s Athlete Performance Awards (APAs) and the goodwill of their NGBs.
Since 2023, UK Sport has strengthened its pregnancy guidance, so that funding cannot be withdrawn simply because an athlete is pregnant, and that pregnancy must be treated as a ‘performance‑related health condition’ rather than a reason to cut someone from a squad.
But the reality varies wildly from sport to sport.
Sponsorship adds another layer of complication for athletes: many contracts still contain ‘material change’ clauses that have historically allowed brands to reduce or pause payments during pregnancy, and there’s no legal obligation for sponsors to protect pregnant athletes.
A handful of companies have updated their policies, but many athletes still navigate pregnancy in a system that offers policy promises, not enforceable rights.
If it’s hard for women competing at the elite level, it’s even harder for the thousands of women athletes not yet on UK Sport’s elite programmes.
These athletes are in the grey zone between amateur and professional: training full‑time, but not qualifying for an APA. Because they are outside the UK Sport system, they have no guaranteed income, and no pregnancy protections.
Most rely on a patchwork of part‑time work, club support, small sponsorships, and personal savings to keep their sporting ambitions alive.
With such precarious income sources, if the athlete becomes pregnant, their financial support can simply stop. This usually means the end of their sporting career.
Many athletes have spoken publicly about this.
Sarah Holt, a GB hammer thrower long‑listed for London 2012, described how her income vanished overnight when she became pregnant because she was outside UK Sport funding.
Without maternity protections or structured support, she had to leave the sport entirely.
She spoke to BBC Sport in 2019, explaining that she ‘fell out of the system overnight. Once I wasn’t on funding, that was it.’
Emma Pallant‑Browne, now a world‑class triathlete, has spoken about an early‑career pregnancy that forced her out of middle‑distance running and she never returned.
“I lost my place in the programme and I didn’t know how to come back,” Pallant-Browne says to Tri247. “There was no pathway for returning. I had to start again in a different sport.”
In football, Katie Chapman left the game after her second pregnancy because the pre‑professional Women’s Super League offered no maternity pay, no childcare support and no job security. She only returned years later once the league professionalised.
Chapman said to The Guardian in 2019, “I had to choose between my family and my career.”
Elite women’s sport still carries the legacy of a system built around male career patterns, and assumptions about what an athlete’s life should be.
Pregnancy exposes this structural bias: instead of a normal physiological event in a woman’s athletic lifespan, pregnancy is often framed as a liability, or a sign of diminished commitment.
Sporting institutions still have funding models designed around uninterrupted male training-cycles, and policies that treat pregnancy as an exception rather than a normal part of women’s careers.
The result, as a UK study by Kings College shows, is that many athletes still fear disclosing pregnancy for anxieties about loss of status or income, and have to navigate pregnancy in a sporting environment that is not suited to their needs.
It’s clear that pregnancy at an elite level in sport is no easy choice.
“You go to work, go to training, you come back and are a parent, but who is there to look after the child if you can’t afford the new nursery?” says Dr Massey.
“The next steps to help women athletes continue to pursue their career and have a family should explore the intricacies of different sports and the implications they can have on pregnancy.
“The more we explore them, the more we know what is possible.
“It doesn’t need to be inspirational, it just needs to be normal.”
