Queen Of The Track

American sprinter Allyson Felix reigns supreme after breaking records in Qatar – and she’s also blazing a trail as an advocate for maternal health

- Dennis Cavernelis

SPORTS fans were transfixed. A woman shattering legendary sprinter Usain Bolt’s record was already remarkable, but doing it just 10 months after undergoing an emergency Caesarean following a life-threatening complication? Who was she, Wonder Woman?

Allyson Felix has won many medals during the course of her career but the one she claimed in Qatar recently is surely her most memorable.

Not only did she help her American teammates win the first-ever World Athletics Championships mixed-gender 4x400m relay, she also left Jamaican sensation Bolt in the dust.

Now with an incredible 13 gold medals to her name, she’s surpassed him as the most successful athlete in the history of world athletics.

But what made the medal even more special was that it was the first she’d won since recently becoming a mom. “To have my daughter here watching means the world to me,” Allyson (33) said after the race. “It’s been a crazy year for me.”

You can say that again. Less than a year ago she was rushed to hospital for an emergency C-section after a routine pregnancy check-up revealed she had preeclampsia, a dangerous condition involving high blood pressure that can be fatal to both mother and baby. “It’s amazing how quickly your priorities change in moments like this,” Allyson wrote in an essay recently published on sports website espn.com.

“At that point, the only thing I cared about was that my daughter, Camryn, was okay. I didn’t care if I ever ran track again. I was just praying she’d be okay.”

Camryn was born on 28 November last year, six weeks premature. She spent almost a month in neonatal intensive care suffering from bradycardia, a condition that slows down the heart rate and causes breathing difficulty in infants.