On the track, staying in her lane was essential for Olympic champion Allyson Felix, the most decorated track and field athlete of all time. To stray outside the lines would mean instant disqualification.
Off the track, Felix faced a different kind of pressure to stay in her lane – keeping on good terms with her primary sponsor, Nike. As for many top athletes, an endorsement deal with the company – the largest shoe and athletic apparel maker in the world – meant financial security in a career that by its nature is fleeting.
It came as shocking news, then, when Felix publicly took on the company in 2019, writing a New York Times op-ed that criticized the corporation’s maternity policies governing its roster of female stars.
“I’ve been one of Nike’s most widely marketed athletes. If I can’t secure maternity protections, who can?” she wrote. “If we have children, we risk pay cuts from our sponsors during pregnancy and afterward. It’s one example of a sports industry where the rules are still mostly made for and by men.”
Her story of incredible success in track and field, and her battle with Nike, is told in the documentary She Runs the World, directed by Perri Peltz and Matt O’Neill. It just screened at the Bentonville Film Festival in Arkansas after holding its world premiere June 5 at Tribeca Festival.
“I was the type of athlete who I just put my head down,” Felix observed during a Q&A at Bentonville moderated by Deadline. “I did try to stay in my lane for so long. I was a people pleaser. I didn’t want to ruffle feathers. And so this idea of speaking out was so uncomfortable, but I think the one thing that really gave me that push and that courage was becoming a mother — and becoming a mother to a daughter. It made me see the world in a different way and that there really was a need behind speaking out. It was still terrifying and uncomfortable and all those things, but there was definitely purpose behind it.”
In 2017, Felix’s Nike contract came up for renewal. Then 32, Felix understood she couldn’t hope to dominate her sport much longer. So did Nike, which offered her a 70 percent pay cut.
“They thought I was just done,” Felix says in the film. “I felt discarded.”
Clauses were built into the proposed contract incentivizing Felix if she kept reaching podiums, and penalizing her financially if she didn’t. Complicating matters for Felix, she very much wanted to become pregnant with her husband, Kenneth Ferguson. Recovering from a pregnancy would postpone attempts to rack up more medals, jeopardizing her income. It’s a dilemma, of course, that male athletes don’t encounter.
Olympic gold medalist Joanna Hayes says in the documentary, “Pregnancy in sports has been the kiss of death.”
As the film documents, tense negotiations continued between Felix, her older brother Wes Felix – who manages her career – and Nike. Ultimately, brother and sister were able to get the company to slightly improve its offer, but Nike wouldn’t spell out in the contract that it was offering specific protections tied to maternity. The clear inference is that Nike didn’t want to establish a precedent for other women athletes in its stable.
“For someone like Allyson, as she said, staying in her own lane, being the good girl, doing the right thing — to go up against a company like that, it’s phenomenal,” executive producer Tonya Lewis Lee observed at the Q&A. “And not only that, I mean she got them to change their policy.”
As the New York Times reported, within only a few months of Felix publishing her op-ed, following “broad public outcry and a congressional inquiry, Nike announced a new maternity policy for all sponsored athletes… The new contract guarantees an athlete’s pay and bonuses for 18 months around pregnancy. Three other athletic apparel companies added maternity protections for sponsored athletes.”
Matt O’Neill, the co-director, calls what Felix achieved a major win.
“As you see as Allyson tells the story, and as you see as we tell the story, Nike does the right thing and the needle is moved and the industry changes,” he said. “Few people do the right thing every time right off the bat. And I think it is a success story for everybody that the industry can change, and change is possible, and things move in the right direction.”
O’Neill said Nike has not commented publicly on the film since its world premiere at Tribeca.
“There hasn’t been a reaction to the film itself [from the company],” he commented. “But we went to Nike with a series of questions [during production] because there’s lots of things that are said in the film, and we wanted to have their point of view on things that were said. And based on that conversation, nothing changed in the film.”
Felix, now the mother of two – a boy and a girl – retired from competition in 2022, going out on top with gold at the World Championships in the 4 × 400-meter relay. That meet, fittingly, was held in Eugene, Ore., where the Nike empire was born.
“I’ve been a very private person for the majority of my life and so it really was so different and a big decision to decide to do this,” she said of participating in the documentary. “Did I want to be this vulnerable? Did I want to share this story? And I think the answer that kept coming back was just I feel like it could help. I feel like it could have some impact.”
During her career, Felix won multiple golds in solo events and in relays – the latter being the very definition of a joint endeavor. Speaking of She Runs the World, she keeps the focus on the production as a whole.
“This is an incredible team to get to work with,” she said. “They just put me at ease; it was very comfortable through the years that they followed me and I think it was able to translate really, really well. But I think that was the whole difference is just the team and how amazing they are.”
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