Olympic mums on top of the podium

When Martin Cross was rowing for Great Britain 40 years ago the thought of a mother competing at the Olympics was unheard of; bringing your spouse to training was frowned upon.
“To be honest, if a woman had had a child the chances were that it wouldn’t be known about,” the multiple Olympian tells The Detail.
Now he’s among those singing the loudest praises for the “supermums” as a commentator at the Paris games.
“The stories are now known and they’re being celebrated.”
After the Emma Twigg battle for gold and silver in single sculls, Cross gushed over their hug at the finish line.
“That is so beautiful, so beautiful,” he said. “The respect, the fondness, the love between those two athletes.” He went on to talk about Twigg’s partner Charlotte and their son Tommy born in 2022 watching the race.
Cross has watched as the sport has become much more friendly and understanding. Large rowing nations such as New Zealand are less rigid, while the funding that is now available to athletes means that competing mums get much more financial support.
Of the gold medal-winning double scullers Lucy Spoors and Brooke Francis, he points to their unique bond as mothers.
“They’ve relished their training time more than they ever have.”
Sports journalist Suzanne McFadden says it has taken trailblazers such as Dame Valerie Adams and Silver Fern Ameliaranne Ekenasio to bring about change but it has been a long time coming.
It took coach Dame Noeline Taurua in 2018 to insist that Netball New Zealand embrace mums at the top of the sport. It meant that Ekenasio, who struggled with little or no support with her first baby, was invited to every Silver Ferns camp when she was pregnant with her second child and after the baby was born, even if she couldn’t be part of the game physically.
“Even if she couldn’t be involved physically, she still felt she was part of the team, she was still paid to be part of the team, she was still part of that whole culture. So netball is only just coming into that realisation as well,” says McFadden.
But many top female athletes who are pregnant or who have become new mums still struggle to get the right advice. New Zealand long-distance runner Camille French ran the Auckland half marathon when her baby was only four months old.
“She said nobody was telling her what to do and she felt like she had this hole in her abdomen where her abs used to be and that she thought her stomach was going to fall out because the muscles hadn’t come back together.”
More research is needed on the impact of pregnancy and birth on high-performance athletes, McFadden says, but what is known is that new mothers’ bone mineral density is reduced immediately after childbirth because the calcium is making breast milk.
“That can lead to stress fractures, there’s anaemia to consider, the ligaments change in your body because of the hormones, they’re a lot looser. So you’ll do something and not realise that you’ve probably injured yourself. Then there’s the lack of sleep.
“That’s really where the support of a sports organisation needs to comes in if this athlete wants to continue at the level they were.”
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