Mallory Weggemann, a Paralympic swimming champion, is set to compete in her fourth Paralympic Games in Paris, and she’s doing it as a new mom.
In 2008, Weggemann had been undergoing a series of epidural injections to treat shingles and the third one left her paralyzed from the waist down. After her sister took her to the University of Minnesota to watch the U.S. Team Trials for the Paralympic Games Beijing 2008, she was inspired to get back into swimming and became a champion. She has won five paralympic medals for swimming and is set to become the first disabled on-air correspondent for NBCUniversal’s Paris Olympics coverage on CNBC and E! during the summer games.
After giving birth to her daughter, Weggemann considered retirement but decided against it, and qualified for Team USA 15 months after giving birth. She told Glamour that she felt forced to choose between being a mom and competing as an athlete.
“It felt like the expectation was that I would silo those two identities – athlete and mother – and break them apart,” she said. “I didn’t feel like there was a path forward that showed how this could work. We’re still learning; more women are competing through motherhood and athletics, but we still don’t have an abundance of representation showing us how.”
Becoming a mother has also given her a newfound appreciation for all that her body has been able to accomplish. “Watching everything my body did through that season — going through IVF, pregnancy, competing at 26 weeks pregnant at Nationals, training as much as I could throughout, postpartum, and all that comes with healing following a C-section — I look back and I see all the ways that my body served me over the past two and a half years, and it’s remarkable,” she said. [Editor’s Note: Though Live Action does not support the use of IVF (read more here), we believe that all human beings, regardless of their means of conception, have human dignity and value, and are worthy of the right to life. This includes embryos who may die, be destroyed, or remain perpetually frozen as a result of reproductive technologies.]
READ: Top Myths DEBUNKED: The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
She also admitted to struggling with postpartum mental health, which was part of what had led her to consider retiring.
“I always had this dream of racing as a mom and competing as a mom, but there was a period of time after Charlotte was born that was so tough for me. It wasn’t because I don’t love to swim; I just didn’t feel like there was a path forward that showed how this could work,” she said. “But finally, through the support of my community, I realized that there’s space for me to bring all of it into who I am and the totality of who I am, and I started feeling like I had that path forward. It was a challenging time because for most of it, quite frankly, that conversation of ‘Is it just time to let it go?’ felt like it was being driven by external factors and not having the support that I needed. I just felt like there wasn’t a place to do this as a mom, and I knew that my relationship with Charlotte was not something I was even remotely willing to sacrifice.”
Track-and-field superstar Allyson Felix is helping women like Weggemann, who are both athletes and mothers, have more support. In 2021, she created a childcare fund with $200,000 in grant money to cover childcare costs for qualified athlete moms competing in the Tokyo Olympics; most of those athletes did not have corporate sponsorship. For this year’s games, Felix teamed with Pampers to create the first-ever Pampers nursery in the Olympic Village, allowing athletes to spend time with their children while they compete.
“I just knew how difficult it was to compete at the top level after I had my daughter, and some practical things were really hard. And so when I joined the Athletes Commission of the IOC, I really wanted to be that voice for athlete moms, and just take away one less thing for them to worry about in the pressure of competition,” Felix 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.”
Weggemann also stressed the importance of disability representation, taking place for the first time during this year’s games.
“I’m really excited for it. It’s a really unique opportunity; an active summer athlete has never done this,” she said. “We’ve never had a disabled host in the US for the Olympics before either. I’m doing what I love while also serving as a path forward for the disability community in a world in which we’re yearning to see representation and media and entertainment. That’s really special too.”
