Tori Bowie’s death highlighted a devastating reality for Black women in the US
The last time Tianna Madison saw Tori Bowie alive was at a meet in Gainesville, Florida. This was in April 2021 – back when the rival sprinters were on separate quests to regain the form that powered them to gold in the 4x100m at the 2016 Olympics. Bowie was one of track and field’s most striking personalities, a speed demon as well as a style icon, the elite runner whose goto accessory was a colorful hair scarf. Madison always looked forward to sharing the spotlight with her. There were hugs, pleasantries and no hard feelings when Madison beat Bowie in the 100m – the pair finished second and ninth, respectively
“At a meet, I always want to circle back and catch up with people,” Madison says. “But it’s also work; you race, you’re sweaty, exhausted, hungry …”
Madison figured she’d run into Bowie again at the US Olympic Trials, where a ticket to the Tokyo Games was on the line. But when Covid restrictions finally let up and the country’s best runners converged on Eugene, Oregon, in June 2021, Bowie was nowhere to be seen. Once a fixture on the big stage, Bowie’s attendance at races tapered off. After that April meet in Gainesville she only competed three more times over the ensuing 13 months. This past April sheriff’s deputies in Orange county, Florida, discovered her dead inside her home after no one had seen or heard from her for several days. An autopsy found that the 32-year-old had died while eight months pregnant, after going into premature labor. Her baby girl, called “Ariana” in Bowie’s funeral program, was stillborn.
The tragedy has Bowie’s friends and colleagues in the track and field community grasping to make meaning out of her loss without reducing her legacy to cliche.
“Her life was so much more than her death,” says Sanya Richards-Ross, the NBC Sports analyst who briefly overlapped with Bowie at the tail end of her own gilded sprint career. “She was an overcomer and a victor.”
-In death, however, Bowie has become something else: a symbol of a US child birthing epidemic that has reached crisis point. According to a 2021 CDC report, there was a 40% rise in maternal deaths in the US over the previous year. Some will be tempted to chalk that final figure – 32.9 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births – to the pandemic. But discounting that nonetheless puts the US’s maternal mortality rate is still about 10 times the rate of countries such as Australia, Japan and Germany. The danger is even more acute for Black women, who are three times more likely than their white counterparts to die from pregnancy-related causes in the US. Much of that disparity comes down to health providers ignoring Black women’s birthing preferences and concerns.
Beyoncé and Serena Williams are two prominent Black women who have pulled backthe curtain on their harrowing experiences in labor over the years. Madison and compatriot Allyson Felix have openly discussed their own close calls in the delivery room, too. Had Bowie lived, her becoming the third member of Team USA’s golden girls relay squad in Rio to face a traumatic childbirth after Felix and Madison probably wouldn’t have become worldwide news. But in death, Bowie gave a human face to a devastating problem and made it stick.
Here was a double world champion and one of the fastest women ever, dying from something women all over the planet go through every day. The postmortem attributed Bowie’s passing to complications from respiratory distress and eclampsia, a high blood pressure condition infamous for stalking pregnant Black women. The report further noted Bowie’s history of bipolar disorder. Mental health problems are a known maternal mortality accelerant; the CDC links them to nearly a quarter of the pregnancy-related deaths between 2017 and 2019.
Bowie’s manager, Kimberly Holland, who also spoke to the Guardian at length, said her client skipped prenatal appointments expressly to avoid hospital care; this was despite Bowie having insurance and the financial means for first-rate medical care. Such wariness is commonplace among Black Americans and well earned with Black women. The so-called “father of gynecology,” a US physician named J Marion Sims, was an unrepentant eugenicist whose anesthesia-free experiments on “clamorous” women and girls in slavery continue to guide conventional medical practice. This year Los Angeles’s Cedar Sinai Medical Center became the focus of an federal civil rights investigation after a woman bled to death following a 17-minute C-section. (The case is ongoing.)
Kamala Harris has made the maternal mortality crisis a Biden administration focus, but her proposals have struggled to garner legislative support; the Momnibus Act, Congressional Democrats’ attempt at the same reforms, hasn’t fared any better. Among the likely sticking points is the call for implicit bias training for medical practitioners. “Data [from medical health associations] tells us that when they have questioned medical students, a significant number of them still carry biases around – whether Black people have a different pain threshold,” Harris said in a recent interview with the BET news program America in Black. “I mean, it’s shocking to think that that is … possible.” -Madison is intimately familiar with the crisis. She had hoped to sidestep the trauma by never becoming a mother in the first place. “I was gonna be Rich Auntie,” she jokes. “I wasn’t willing to risk it.”
That changed in 2021, a year that saw her compete at the US Olympic Trials while two months pregnant – and place 10th in the long jump. Madison figured her world-class conditioning and smarts would keep her from becoming another statistic.
“But knowledge doesn’t save you,” she says “The first call I had with the doctor’s office before they met me, when they’re doing intake, as soon as I said ‘African American, 36 years old,’ they were like: ‘Cool, let’s schedule your C-section.’”
But that plan was thwarted when Madison went into labor in her second trimester. She rushed to the hospital holding her last will and testament and clear instructions for her partner – Charles Ryan, an assistant track coach at the University of California, Berkeley – to prioritize her life if doctors forced him to choose between mother and child. But even with a new plan in place, she says, “I was not confident I was coming home.”