Team Canada’s Jill Moffatt is on a mission to support athlete parents

Two-time Olympian Jill Moffatt has retired from rowing, but is far from leaving the world of sport behind. Instead, Moffatt is combining her athletic experience and academic background in gender equity into new goals—pursuing a PhD and helping run MOMentum.

MOMentum is a non-profit founded by a team of Olympians and academics, dedicated to supporting Canadian women athletes in Canada. The organization’s fundamental belief is that one should not have to choose between an athletic career and having a family.

READ: MOMentum building for athlete moms on the road to Paris 2024

Throughout her undergraduate and master’s degree programs, Moffatt focused on gender equity within the health sciences. She assumed that she would eventually pursue a career in women’s health policy, but never really considered bringing sport into that professional direction.

But while doing a journalism fellowship after the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, Moffatt decided to pursue a piece on athlete motherhood in Canada, in large part because egg-freezing was such a significant topic of conversation within the women’s national rowing team, of which she was a member.

“I began asking questions and hearing all these stories, especially from people like [Olympians] Melissa Bishop, Kim Gaucher, and Mandy Bujold, and it kind of blew my mind,” Moffatt said.

She herself hadn’t given the reality of family planning during a competitive career much thought before, as she wasn’t personally planning to have kids at that point in her life. But once she started delving into the issue, Moffatt couldn’t get it off her mind. Now, post-Paris 2024, Moffatt’s doctoral work will combine her backgrounds in health sciences, journalism, and sport to examine media coverage of athlete mothers.

“I find the policies interesting, but also the ideas behind talking about athlete motherhood—what that actually says and means, and unpacking things that we take for granted,” Moffatt said.

Moffatt’s view on Paris 2024 media coverage

When it comes to media coverage of athlete mothers and parenthood during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Moffatt points to the importance of embracing tension when it comes to covering issues regarding gender equity. That is, balancing celebrating progress with acknowledging the struggle it took to get there and the work left to do.

“One of the things I found really interesting about the Paris Games was the coverage around the athlete nursery,” said Moffatt. “I felt like there was a lot of ‘woohoo!’ and then that was kind of it.

“In my dream world, we could have had more ‘how we got here’ coverage, or ‘these are the women that really pushed for this.’ A lot of the coverage is reactive, rather than proactive.”

One of the things that Moffatt was hopeful about regarding the coverage at Paris 2024 was the media asking athlete parents about the reality of balancing parenting and sport responsibilities.

“Athlete moms, they’re not the ones who are glossing over it,” said Moffatt.

Many of those athlete parents also needed to get past their own preconceived notions of combining sport and children. For example, two-time Olympic medallist freestyle skier Cassie Sharpe told Olympic.ca this past fall that when she got pregnant, her immediate thought was that she would need to retire because “I can’t do that. I’m not a superhero.”

READ: “It takes a village”: Olympic medallist Cassie Sharpe returns to competition after becoming a mom

The “super mom” is a problematic trope of the woman who can seemingly just “do it all”—a narrative that, as Moffatt and her colleagues pointed out in an article in The Conversation, overlooks the systemic challenges of undertaking motherhood and sport without adequate support. The expectation that one should be able to “do it all” places enormous pressure on all professional women, athletes included.

Like the balance of celebration and grounding needed in talking about progress in gender equity at the Games, the experience of athletes returning to sport after childbirth is also a yes, and situation.

“A lot of studies show that with support, it is doable. [Having kids] is not a career-ending thing with the right support,” said Moffatt.

But not only is that support element huge, when normalizing the idea of returning to elite sport post-partum, the sporting community also needs to be wary of swinging the spectrum over to an assumption that athletes can just “bounce back”—without acknowledging the need for adjustments and adaptations to address a significant physiological, emotional, and lifestyle change.

Funding for change

Moffatt sees sport funding in Canada as one of the key elements holding National Sport Organizations (NSOs) back from offering greater support. Increased strain on NSO budgets places more of the financial burden on athletes to fund their pathways, leaving fewer personal funds for family planning measures like egg freezing or IVF. Not only that, but with resources stretched to max capacity already, important areas like gender equity are often sidelined as policy and program priorities.

READ: Momentum: 3×3 basketball player Paige Crozon sheds light on elite sport and motherhood

Moffatt says she would love to see more NSOs be proactive when it comes to parental support but acknowledges that many of them are already stretched too thin on basic operations alone. Important initiatives such as parental leave, childcare considerations for required training and travel, or sport science staff with expertise to support post-partum return to sport often get put on the backburner. The last increase to sport funding from the federal government occurred in 2005. The Canadian Olympic Committee noted in March 2024 that NSO purchasing power has decreased by 33% since then.

“Gender equity gets pushed to the side because they don’t have the ability to put these things in place, because they’re just trying to stay afloat,” said Moffatt. “We need some serious changes in the way we fund sport in Canada.”

One win for parenting athletes came in October 2024, when the federal government announced funding for additional “cards” for pregnant athletes through Sport Canada’s Athlete Assistance Program.

Before this change, pregnancy was considered an injury, and required the use of one’s “injury card” to retain funding. With only one injury card available, athletes were forced to make the decision to declare an injury to receive funding during pregnancy, or save their injury card for an actual injury and lose out on their financial assistance during pregnancy. The new pregnancy cards function in many ways, similar to parental leave in any other workplace.

“A lot of athletes fear discrimination for wanting to have a child and come back [to sport], some face that,” Moffatt said. “So having something like this in place definitely allows athletes to know that this is a normal thing to pursue if they want. It’s well within their rights.”

Moffatt counts direct funding in the form of grants to athletes as one of MOMentum’s biggest successes thus far, an initiative that was assisted by Moffatt’s securing of an OLY Canada Legacy Grant from the Canadian Olympic Committee. MOMentum was able to grant money to four Olympians and three Paralympians ahead of Paris 2024. Providing funds to athletes will remain a priority ahead of Milano Cortina 2026.

On International Women’s Day, MOMentum also launched their peer-to-peer network, designed to connect athletes with other athletes who may be able to provide advice about their family planning processes during a sporting career

Canadian women athletes are looking out for each other, and the sport system needs to look out for them too.