‘They said I couldn’t come back’
Liz Mccolgannuttall on being dropped by Nike while pregnant and returning to win memorable 10km gold in Tokyo in 1991. Ben Bloom speaks to a true trailblazer
It is funny, every time Liz Mccolgannuttall hears the latest topical issue in women’s sport, she has a feeling of having been there before.
A victim of merciless sponsors dropping female athletes when they become pregnant? She experienced that. Frowned upon by “experts” for behaving in a way unbefitting a woman? That as well. Proof that motherhood need not be the end of a sporting career by returning to global success after childbirth? She did that.
Three decades before sportswomen were belatedly given a voice to shine a light on issues and injustices affecting female athletes worldwide, Mccolgan-nuttall (or Mccolgan, as she was known during her competitive days) went through all those things alone. She had no choice.
She alleges Nike decided to drop her the moment she told them she was pregnant in 1990. She was an Olympic 10,000m silver medallist, a world indoor 3,000m silver medallist and a double Commonwealth 10,000m champion. To put it simply, she was within touching distance of being the world’s best female distance runner. Yet, she says she was written off in an instant, aged 25.
“They just said the contract was terminated and that was it,” she tells Telegraph
Women’s Sport from Doha, Qatar, where she has been based as an athletics coach for the past six years. “There was no discussion, nothing. That was it – a letter.
“It was hard to hear that because I was one of the best runners around and it was a bit of a shock because I had no income throughout the pregnancy. A lot of people just wrote me off like, ‘That’s her gone’.”
It was, she says, the prevailing attitude of the time. Where the recent World Athletics Championships were adorned with mothers winning gold on their return from childbirth – Shelly-ann Fraser-pryce (100m), Nia Ali (100m hurdles), Liu Hong (20km race walk) and Allyson Felix (4x400m relay) – Mccolgan-nuttall had no one to look at as an indication that she could return to the top.
Quite the opposite: everyone told her she could not. But, against the advice of doctors and members of the public, she carried on training through her pregnancy and proved them all wrong.
“There’s a lot more advice out there now, but when I was pregnant there was nobody,” she recalls. “There was no textbook on what to do and when you went to the doctor, they would just say to stop running. They would say it’s not good for the baby to be running.
“I was even told that it didn’t look good to be running around the streets when pregnant, so I got quite a bit of flak for that. But runners are very active and if you stop doing what is natural to you, you feel worse. People would say, ‘Oh, that can’t be good for the baby’. Things like that. Little snide remarks. But me doing that was like them
going for a walk in the park. I was just
‘There was no textbook. When you went to the doctor they would say it’s not good for the baby to be running
trying to keep my cardiovascular system going.”
Even now, in an era where it is normal for female athletes to return from childbirth, Mccolgan-nuttall’s exploits so quickly afterwards are astonishing.
Just six weeks after her daughter Eilish was born, she contested an international 5km race in Florida; less than four months after labour, she won world cross-country bronze; and by the time nine months had passed, she was world 10,000m champion.
Whether that is proof – as some have argued – of performance-enhancing benefits to pregnancy, Mccolgan-nuttall is unsure. Instead she contests that her success was due to maintaining a level of fitness and the mental relief that she was able to have a child after previous failed attempts.
Yet describing her achievements in such a reductive manner pays no consideration to the challenges of actually caring for a child while still competing at the highest level. The reality was “very difficult”, she admits, and her old attitude of being a stickler for regimented timekeeping was hastily forgotten with training being undertaken whenever the baby routine allowed. Even then, there were the type of disaster
‘I was up for three nights with Eilish and I got my period as well. That was the morning I broke the world record’
moments that all parents will identify with – none more so than when in Tokyo preparing to compete in a half-marathon when Eilish was 14 months old.
“I didn’t have nannies; I was lucky if my mum could come with me but most of the time she couldn’t,” she says. “I was up for three nights with Eilish crying because she got a really bad ear infection. The doctors wouldn’t give her medication because she was foreign, so I had no sleep for three days.
“I was absolutely wrecked. I remember leaving the hotel like a zombie and to make matters worse I got my period on that day as well. It was just ridiculous.
“I walked out and said, ‘I’m just going to run as hard as I can because what’s the worse that can happen?’ That was the morning I broke the world record.”
Juggling motherhood with a professional running career was time-consuming enough to convince her to wait to have any further children. As well as Eilish, 28, Mccolgannuttall had four other children as she neared retirement from competing: Martin, 20, Eamonn, 19, Kieran, 17, and Orla, 14.
Eilish, who won European 5,000m silver last year, has followed her mother’s path into long-distance running and Mccolgan-nuttall now manages another careful balancing act of being a mother and coach to her eldest daughter. It is something she is accustomed to, having overseen Eilish’s training her entire life, but one that became that little bit more complex this summer when Eilish became a victim of body-shaming on social media for supposedly looking too skinny.
“When you’re a coach-mother or coachfather it’s when you get really big disappointments or what happened on Twitter that your emotions become more involved,” says Mccolgan-nuttall. “You never want to see your child hurt, in pain or chastised. It’s difficult to control your emotion because you want to come out and protect them.
“I think I’m in a really special place to share this with my daughter, who is on the same pathway as I was.”
Eilish may not end up as the only one of her children to do so, although the challenge of following such a successful mother into the field she dominated is a daunting one. Mccolgan-nuttall suggests her youngest son may be the most talented runner in the family, but carrying the famous surname is a laborious task.
“Kieran struggles with the name,” she says. “When Eilish was younger and would go to races, parents would be like, ‘That’s a Mccolgan and you’ve just beaten her’. Or they would expect her to win just because she’s a Mccolgan. You would go past people and they would be whispering.”
As for what advice she would give to Eilish or any other career woman wanting to have a child, Mccolgan-nuttall is unequivocal: “Don’t not have a baby because of your sport or your career. They can go side by side.”
How nice it would have been for someone to say those words to her 30 years ago.