Take the example of Idaho native Kristin Armstrong, who had a baby 22 months ago and won a gold in cycling last week.
Maybe she’s not the cycling Armstrong you’re used to hearing about, but she’s one of the most decorated athletes in the sport.
Think two years is plenty time to get into training shape?
Then talk to Aretha Thurmond, a discus thrower from Seattle, who is the sports version of what Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer aspires to. Thurmond threw in a 2007 national championship meet when her son was just 18 days old.
Wow. I hadn’t even managed a shower at that point of motherhood.
Look at her Web site, arethathrows.com, and see the photos of her son in a pumpkin patch and her at a world championship in Brazil. This is her fourth Olympics.
Or take Kara Goucher, a marathoner from Oregon who set her personal best at the Boston Marathon seven months after giving birth to her son.
Not hard core enough for you?
How about archer Khatuna Lorig, who competed for the former Soviet Union in Barcelona in 1992 when she was four months pregnant with her son. He’s 19 now, and she just competed in her fifth Olympic Games, now for Team U.S.A.
She shot an arrow that was such a perfect 10, it bounced off the tiny camera lens dead-center in the target. She placed fourth in these Games, but she helped inspire thousands of young girls to take up the sport by teaching Jennifer Lawrence the fundamentals of archery for the movie version of “The Hunger Games.”
Olympic moms grapple with the same conflicts and guilt as the rest of us do.
One day, basketball star Candace Parker’s 3-year-old daughter, Lailaa, begged her not to go to practice. “That broke my heart,” Parker told Redbook magazine, “but then again there are a lot of moms out there who work 9 to 5 and don’t have the flexibility I have.” She blogs about potty training.
Rampone, the soccer team captain, told Redbook that she misses the day-to-day stuff when she’s practicing or traveling.
“I have wondered, ‘Am I taking too much time for this sport?’ But I try to see the big picture,” she said. “I’m never going to play a perfect game or be a perfect mom.”
Realism helps. So does a supportive family. Many of the Olympic moms are married to fellow athletes, so they have support and understanding from their spouses. Non-athlete husbands are also supportive (or just afraid).
For some, there have been huge obstacles.
Kudos to Lashinda Demus, silver medalist in the 400-meter hurdles, who suffered from postpartum depression in 2007 after delivering twin boys. On her Web site, she speaks about the struggle to crash through the depression and return to training.
And she was also refreshingly honest about the moment she found out she was pregnant, when she was at her athletic peak.
“I was shocked and angry,” she told filmmakers Jen Pottheiser and Danielle Elliot in their fantastic documentary series about Olympic moms.
It is a common theme among moms, the bittersweet feeling that you — as you know yourself and the world knows you — are somehow fading. We wonder whether we’ll become invisible, irrelevant, dissed and dismissed.
“It was a difficult time for me because I thought everything in my career was going to end,” Demus told NBC’s Los Angeles affiliate. “I don’t think at that time, being as young as I was, that I knew you can kind of have both and do it all.”
Her twins, now 4, were in the stands as she competed this week. On television, they could be heard shouting, “Go Mommy! Go Mommy!”
Amen to that.
To read previous columns by Petula Dvorak, go to washingtonpost.com/
dvorak.
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