At the Tokyo Games, held in the summer of 2021, Ona Carbonell (33) denounced in a video that the organization had not allowed her to bring her one-year-old son Kai. The synchronized swimmer regrets that being separated from Kai for a month forced her to stop breastfeeding him. Since then, and especially since she retired in May, the swimmer with the most medals in the history of the world championships has been fighting to reconcile motherhood with elite sport.
Ona Carbonell took part in a talk on Thursday - "Maternity, the pending challenge of female sport" - organized by the Fertility Barcelona assisted reproduction unit of the Quirónsalud hospital and the Teknon Medical Center. The meeting took place at the Juno House women's club and the swimmer was joined by Claudia Galicia (37), skier and mountain biker; Carlota Planas, women's football agent, and Cayetana Barbed, specialist in assisted reproduction.
Barbed emphasized that sportswomen delay motherhood because their careers are short, but the woman's fertile age coincides with the fullness of sports and "when they retire and want to be mothers, it is difficult for them, because of the stress they have been subjected to your body during the sporting stage, that's why you need gynecological advice". Claudia Galicia, who a year ago became the mother of Julia and Paula, pointed out that "I have passed hundreds of doping controls, but none of the gynecological ones. Like many athletes, I didn't have my period and they just told me it was normal, and it's not true, so I had to undergo tough treatments to be a mother."
Carbonell revealed that he has been seeing a psychologist since he was 14, "but when I got pregnant and after the birth of Kai I returned to training, I needed another type of psychological help". This is why the maternity and sports commission that heads the Spanish Olympic Committee calls for specialist professionals, such as gynecologists, to advise sportswomen: "It is important that they do not feel alone and that they do not have to give up nothing". One of the points that the swimmer and mother of two children (Kai and Teo) also considers essential is that during the time they have to be retired, their ranking and sponsorships are maintained.
Another of Ona Carbonell's requests, and which she hopes can already be done at the Paris Games in the summer, is that babies aged 0 to 18 months can accompany their mothers and that there are breastfeeding rooms. In this sense, Carlota Planas explained that in the last women's soccer World Cup (which Spain won) for the first time the players were able to be accompanied by their families and children, and this influenced the mood".
Among the audience attending the talk on motherhood was the former swimmer Maria Pau Corominas, who competed in the Games in Mexico in 1968. “One of the Russian swimmers had a child and we considered her a rare beast, because she did not fit being an athlete and a mother,” she said jokingly. "Now my priority is my daughters - said Claudia Galicia - and that's why I only do one-day races, but I better optimize the time in training".
And Ona Carbonell ended with a sentence from tennis player Naomi Osaka (26), who gave birth to her first daughter in July: "Before I saw motherhood as an obstacle and now I see it as an encouragement".
