Paris 2024 Olympics - Track legend Allyson Felix: “This time of year will always feel like Olympic season”
It is natural that Allyson Felix is still in the Olympic spirit for Paris 2024, the first summer Games that she won't be competing in for 24 years.
The American sprinter competed in five Olympic Games throughout her decorated career, before hanging up her spikes in 2022, having won two medals at Tokyo 2020.
But that Olympic feeling certainly hasn't left the seven-time Olympic champion.
It may be her first Games not competing since 2000, but the International Olympic Committee Athletes’ Commission member will be in Paris nonetheless.
Alysson Felix is pumped for “Olympic season”
Writing on Refinery29, Felix said, “In some ways I’m sure this time of year will always feel like Olympic season. My first time competing in the Games was 20 years ago, in Athens, and when you devote so much of yourself — your time, your focus, your sweat — to this one thing, it’s almost like you develop an internal Olympic clock that’s set to go off every four years.”
Felix has seven gold medals, three silvers and one bronze to her name, one of the greatest U.S. Olympic athletes in history and the most decorated track and field athlete ever.
She continued, “I get hit with the realization that this part of my life is over. The Olympics are still happening this year — I’m just not part of them, at least not in the way I used to be. I’m also really psyched to be able to attend in a new capacity, and to experience what it’s like without that all-consuming pressure, especially when there is so much positive momentum around women’s sport.
“It’s not like I’ll be lazing by the Seine, eating baguettes the whole time.”
Felix and her positive work with the Olympic Village nursery
Felix has been instrumental in one of the best additions to the Paris 2024 Olympic Village: a nursery for those athletes coming with young children, especially mothers, to give them a space to spend time with them.
“It’s a place in the heart of the action,” Felix explained, “where athlete parents can spend time with their babies and young children: to bond, nurse, play, and just experience a level of recognition and respect from the athletic community that has been so lacking in the past.
“I can still remember arriving at the Tokyo games three years ago: having absolutely no idea how I was supposed to be a new mom and an Olympic athlete, and just feeling so alone.”
There will be several mother-athletes who will benefit from the nursery, such as Jamaican track legend Shelly-Ann Fraser Pryce, who is competing in her final Olympics.