A champ finds her voice
ALLYSON FELIX CAN STILL HEAR THE screams. In late 2018, the six-time Olympic gold medalist was sitting in the neonatal intensive-care unit of a hospital outside Detroit, watching her weeks-old daughter fight for her life. Camryn, born premature at 32 weeks, was hooked up to monitors; an alarm would go off when doctors needed to stimulate her breathing. But as frightening as those alarms were, it’s the screaming from a mother in another area of the NICU that still haunts Felix: piercing howls that wouldn’t stop. Nurses rushed to close Felix’s doors. She still doesn’t know what happened to that mother’s baby, but she couldn’t help but imagine the worst. And this, she thought to herself, could happen to Cammy.
Up to this point, Felix had planned to return to the track and add to her record-setting medal haul. But in that moment, the most decorated American female track-and-field Olympian of all time could not have felt farther from a finish line. “I just remember thinking, I don’t know if I’m going to get back,” says Felix. “I don’t know if I can.”
Felix shares this memory from the driver’s seat of her Tesla, while crawling up a congested I-405 in Los Angeles in late May. She’s en route to a training session for the Tokyo Olympics, which will be the 35-year-old’s fifth Games. Camryn, 2, is healthy and starting preschool. But she’s
