Having a baby is life-changing for anyone, but imagine doing it while training for world championships, Olympic qualification, or a professional season. For many female athletes, motherhood has long been viewed as incompatible with elite performance. Today, however, women across different sports are challenging that assumption and showing that becoming a mother doesn’t mean putting their ambitions on hold.
Support Systems Still Depend on the Institution
The sports world has made important progress in supporting athlete mothers, but that support remains inconsistent. In recent years, sports organizations and some clubs have introduced measures aimed at better supporting athlete mothers, including maternity leave policies, medical assistance, and greater job protection. In women’s football, for example, pregnancy is becoming more visible and less stigmatized than it was a decade ago, reflecting a gradual shift in how the sport approaches motherhood. However, as recent coverage of the topic in Brazil highlights, progress remains uneven, and many athletes still rely heavily on personal support systems to balance elite performance and motherhood.
Beyond pregnancy itself, the realities surrounding motherhood in women’s soccer also involve logistical and medical considerations that directly affect athletes’ careers. In Brazil, cases such as Ketlen Wiggers’ pregnancy have highlighted how club support and institutional responses can influence an athlete’s ability to continue competing, with teams adapting training routines and offering varying levels of assistance depending on their structure and resources. Recent developments within Brazilian football also point to a gradual strengthening of support systems for athlete mothers, including broader discussions around medical care, contractual protection, and logistical assistance during pregnancy and the postpartum period.
At the same time, the process of balancing elite performance and motherhood can begin long before childbirth. As discussed in reporting on fertility and high-performance sport, some athletes consider options such as in vitro fertilization or other assisted reproductive methods in order to better align biological and athletic timelines. These decisions add another layer of complexity to an already demanding career, particularly when medical treatments, recovery periods, and hormonal processes must be carefully managed alongside training and competition schedules.
The Challenge Doesn’t End After Childbirth
Returning to elite sport after pregnancy is a gradual process that goes far beyond medical clearance. During the postpartum period, athletes must rebuild strength, endurance, and competitive rhythm while adapting to significant physical and hormonal changes. At the same time, they are learning to balance the demands of motherhood with the expectations of high-performance sport, making recovery as much a personal challenge as a structural one. Access to specialized medical care, individualized training plans, childcare, and institutional support can play a decisive role in determining how successfully an athlete returns to competition
This broader reality is not limited to football and can also be seen in other sports, where athlete mothers navigate similar challenges when returning to elite competition. The Brazilian swimmer Etiene Medeiros is a very good example. After becoming a mother, she returned to training while rebuilding her performance level and redefining her long-term goals in the sport. Her comeback gained even more meaning with the inclusion of the women’s 50-meter backstroke in the Olympic program for Los Angeles 2028, a race that was once her signature event and where she made history as a world champion. For Medeiros, motherhood did not close the door on her Olympic ambitions; instead, it reframed them.
Etiene returns to training and competing with SESI-SP, the club she represented before pausing her career to become a mother. Beyond her personal comeback, the swimmer believes that the challenges faced by athlete mothers reveal broader issues within Brazilian sport. Comparing the country with international examples, she argued that motherhood and high performance are still often treated as incompatible realities. “Outside Brazil, this is very common, here in Brazil not, for several reasons, whether financial, cultural or simply understanding that motherhood can go hand in hand with performance. So I think this can also be a slap in the face of various institutions, various standards that put women in a ‘little box’ that they have to be this or that. So I think it is also a moment of deconstruction,” she said in an interview with Folha de Pernambuco.
A Sport Still in Transition
Ultimately, the experiences of athlete mothers point to a sport that is still in transition. While progress is visible in policies, visibility, and individual comebacks, motherhood in elite sport continues to depend largely on uneven support structures and personal resilience. The challenge moving forward is not only to recognize that athletes can return after childbirth, but to ensure that their careers do not have to be rebuilt in spite of the systems around them. Instead, the question becomes whether elite sport is willing to evolve at the same pace as the women competing within it.
_________________
The article above was edited by Julia Galoro.
Liked this type of content? Check Her Campus Cásper Líbero home page for more!