Special report The mother of all battles for elite sportswomen
Competing for your country can come at a price as Fiona Tomas and Molly Mcelwee expose inadequate maternity rights and childcare provision for Britain’s top athletes
Minutes after Casey Kopua won the World Cup with the New Zealand netball team last summer, she scooped up her daughter, Maia, for a post-match interview. Capitalising on her impromptu media appearance, the threeyear-old melted viewers’ hearts by licking the sweat glistening off her mother who, unknown to her at the time, had just played the Silver Ferns’ entire campaign while pregnant with her second child.
New Zealand and Australia netball have been pioneering maternity policies in elite sport for years. Benefits for sporting mothers first surfaced at Netball New Zealand nearly two decades ago, but the launch of Australia’s professional Suncorp league in 2017 set a new benchmark for female athletes, with round-the-clock nannies and travel allowances for children younger than 12 months.
Cricket Australia introduced its own landmark maternity policy last summer, guaranteeing support for athletes’ children up to the age of four. “Australia and New Zealand do it a hell of a lot better,” sighs Tamsin Greenway, the former England netballer and one of a handful of women from her sport who bucked the trend by having a child mid-career. “Their culture is different: they have babies, they come back to play. Our culture has always been: you stop playing, you have kids.”
Athlete Performance Agreements, which have been used to fund British athletes on world-class programmes since 1997, have been central to preserving such ideology. Athletes on APAS are not seen as employees, an issue that was thrust back into the spotlight this week when former track cyclist Jess Varnish appealed her landmark legal case against British Cycling and UK Sport for recognition as an employee.
Should the original ruling on Varnish’s case be quashed, it could radically change the employment status of Olympic and Paralympic athletes and finally enshrine their rights, including maternity pay.
England Netball’s athletes are on APAS. The governing body says it supports pregnant athletes, offering advice and support “alongside their antenatal healthcare provider”. It says APA funding continues, dependent on quarterly reviews: “If the required commitment and/or progress has not been achievable the athlete may be given a notice period… before APA support coming to an end.”
Of all the sports in which England has professional national teams, the England and
‘Australia and New Zealand do it a hell of a lot better … their culture is different: they have babies, they come back to play’
Wales Cricket Board is the only governing body to provide evidence of a bespoke maternity policy. Female cricketers are guaranteed full salary for the first 13 weeks after childbirth and 20 weeks at 90 per cent pay thereafter, exceeding the UK’S statutory leave of 90 per cent of pay for six weeks, and £151.20 for 33 weeks subsequently.
The Football Association said its policy for contracted England players varies from the UK statutory one, but declined to comment on details. The Rugby Football Union’s employee-wide maternity policy includes female players on professional XV contracts.
When it comes to childcare, support across England teams is almost nonexistent. Compare that to the US women’s national football team, which has paid for nannies at training camps since 1996. Since then, 10 mothers have played for the team after giving birth. The mediocrity of maternity policies across England teams is startling compared with the advances sportswomen have made through collective bargaining agreements elsewhere. The growing trend of CBAS saw players in Spanish football’s top flight negotiate their first deal in January and gain maternity rights. That month, players in the United States’ Women’s National Basketball Association scored their biggest win to date through the same process.
As vice-president of her league’s players’ association, US basketball and WNBA player Sue Bird helped secure a positively futuristic package for all 144 players which includes childcare stipends, full-pay maternity leave and up to $60,000 (£49,000) for veteran players to put towards things like adoption
fees or fertility treatments. Bird had her own eggs frozen last year, aged 38. The contrast with the UK is all the more stark given a 2019 Unicef report found the US to be the only nation, from a list of the world’s 41 richest, not to offer paid maternity leave.
“It shouldn’t be a benefit, it should be a given,” Bird says. “You have many different women starting their families in many different ways and you have to support all of that, because we’re basketball players and our bodies are part of our livelihood. To get this was groundbreaking, this is history. Before we had maternity leave [at 50 per cent pay], but this is so much more progressive. Hopefully we’re not the exception to the rule, but it becomes the rule – another women’s league can see this and adopt it themselves and make it universal.”
That aspiration seems a long way off in football’s Women’s Super League in England, where just four out of 12 clubs confirmed maternity policies that surpass UK statutory guidelines. Five WSL clubs refused to respond to requests from The
Telegraph. The majority of clubs we did speak to used their general staff maternity policies rather than one designed for the needs of a female athlete.
Manchester United boast the only bespoke policy for players, which goalkeeper Siobhan Chamberlain is currently benefiting from. It is no coincidence, she says, that there are so few mothers in the league given the lack of structural support in place: “From a football club’s perspective, you don’t want to lose the player. I can understand why [a club] wouldn’t want to sign someone that wasn’t going to be available. But at the same time you should be comfortable to have a child. So, I can see both sides of it, and I don’t think there’s an easy answer.”
It is an even thornier issue for National Lottery-funded athletes and their governing bodies. “We encourage all funded sports to have policies in place across a number of areas, including maternity,” said a UK Sport spokesperson. “While we offer a framework and guidance around maternity, ultimately it is the responsibility of the individual sport to implement their own policy.”
Yet there is widespread reluctance to do so. As the profile of women’s sport increases, some believe a system which obstructs athletes’ rights to any maternity policy – let alone a statutory one – is wholly unrealistic. “We can’t have the rest of the country, and the law, leaping ahead, making such amazing strides, and sport being left behind,” says Genevieve Gordon, the chair of the British Association of Sport and Law. “It doesn’t incentivise anybody to represent their country – male or female. Governing bodies have to stand up and work with UK Sport to make maternity leave possible.”
Greenway is in agreement. “We’ll move away from APAS,” she insists. “As governing bodies, especially non-olympic, they’ll have to fund everything themselves and at some point athletes will have to be employed. You can’t possibly have athletes who are not on maternity leave. Moving forward, if some of the best players in the world are playing until they are 38, 39, 40, then we’ve got to expect that, at some point, there are going to be more babies involved in this.”
Yet if the British sports scene is to become genuinely welcoming to mothers, communication will be key. Two-time Olympic 400 metres hurdler Eilidh Doyle maintains she was not told she would be kept on her British Athletics funding until her third trimester, long after she informed her performance director she was pregnant and was intending to return post-birth. Doyle, a qualified teacher, was so unsure as to what she was entitled to, she took on work with Education Scotland during pregnancy.
“I know now there is a clause there to support pregnant women, but I didn’t know at the time when I was pregnant,” she says. “There needs to be a lot of transparency between the athletes and the governing body. I told them what my plan was and they were supportive of it, so they knew I was going to try my best to get back. I think they [British Athletics] don’t want to be seen to be rushing you back. It’s almost like you need a bit of guidance or there needs to be contact so they know how you’re progressing.”
Doyle found common ground with Bianca Williams, a member of the British sprint relay team who gave birth to a son in March. Williams says that she is unsure how much consideration her pregnancy would have been given at funding allocation meetings in November if the Tokyo Olympics had gone ahead this year: “I don’t have anything in writing on how it would work. If I wasn’t able to compete at trials [in June], and so not go to the Olympics, I think that would’ve definitely impacted my chances of being funded for next year.” British Athletics told The
Telegraph it follows the UK Sport guidelines around female athletes and maternity leave on the World Class Programme, which state that an athlete can continue to receive funding during and after pregnancy.
To date, some of the world’s greatest sportswomen – from Allyson Felix, Shellyann Fraser-pryce and Jessica Ennis-hill – have combined medals with motherhood. With the growing profile of women’s sport, one wonders how much longer female athletes and the issue of maternity rights can be sidelined.
Jess Varnish has appealed the decision in her landmark legal case against British Cycling and UK Sport; Manchester United goalkeeper Siobhan Chamberlain (main image, with daughter Emelia) is grateful for her club’s support; Bianca Williams gave birth to a son in March and is unsure how it would have affected her funding had Olympic trials gone ahead ‘We can’t have the rest of the country, and the law, leaping ahead, making amazing strides, and sport being left behind’