US sporting goods giant Nike, under fire for financially penalizing sponsored athletes who become pregnant, is changing its maternity policy, the New York Times reported.
“We’ve recognized Nike Inc can do more and there is an important opportunity for the sports industry collectively to evolve to better support female athletes,” Nike spokeswoman Sandra Carreon-John told the newspaper in an e-mail on Friday.
According to the Times, Nike plans to waive performance-pay reductions for 12 months for athletes who decide to have a baby.
The move comes after Olympic track and field star Allyson Felix joined a chorus of critics.
Felix, the only female track and field athlete to win six Olympic gold medals, wrote in the New York Times that she had been offered a vastly reduced contract by Nike since taking time off last year during her pregnancy.
The 33-year-old spoke out after US teammates Alysia Montano and Kara Goucher leveled similar allegations against Nike as part of an investigation by the Times.
“They told stories that we athletes know are true, but that we have been too scared to tell publicly: If we have children, we risk pay cuts from our sponsors during pregnancy and afterward,” wrote Felix, who gave birth to a baby girl in December last year.
She opted to start a family despite concern over renewal of her Nike sponsorship deal that expired at the end of 2017.
The company offered her a new deal that was much less lucrative and balked at her request for guarantees that she would not be penalized if she performed below her best “in the months surrounding childbirth.”
“If I, one of Nike’s most widely marketed athletes, couldn’t secure these protections, who could?” Felix wrote.
Nike said in a statement last week that it had “standardized our approach across all sports to support our female athletes during pregnancy, but we recognize we can go even further.”
In a memo addressed to Nike employees on Friday — reported by both the New York Times and Bloomberg — Amy Montagne, a company vice president and its general manager for global properties, wrote that she was “saddened” to learn of Felix’s experience.
“This has been a humbling event,” Montagne wrote, adding that the company was reaching out to sponsored women athletes to advise them of policy changes.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier