The conversation Cecile Landi never imagined she’d feel compelled to have with the gymnasts she coaches came abruptly last summer, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Landi, who competed for her native France at the 1996 Olympics before going into coaching with her husband, Laurent, gave her athletes a brief, heartfelt message: I’m here for you no matter what.
“I literally will do whatever they need me to do (if they get pregnant), even if I guess it puts me in trouble,” said Landi, who coaches in Texas, a state with one of the country’s strictest abortion bans.
For Landi, whose athletes have included seven-time Olympic medalist and five-time world champion Simone Biles and 2020 Olympic silver medalist Jordan Chiles, having a public conversation about such a private matter is part of her evolving role.
“It’s just way more than coaching, the relation we have with the athletes, talking to them about everything,” she said.
Landi’s holistic approach to her job reflects the rapidly shifting tectonic plates of the athlete-coach relationship at all levels of sports, particularly those involving women.
The overturn of Roe v. Wade added another complex and potentially fraught layer for coaches and athletes to navigate, joining a list that includes everything from the ever-evolving rules around name, image and likeness to LGBTQIA+ inclusion and transgender rights to states weighing whether to track the menstrual cycles of high schoolers.
For some coaches, the constantly shifting landscape is making their profession more demanding than ever.
“They’re getting overwhelmed,” said Dr. Kathryn Ackerman, a sports medicine physician based in Boston and the co-chair of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s Women’s Health Task Force. “They are overwhelmed with all of the different issues that are coming into the female athlete space.”
None may have a greater long-term impact than the overturn of Roe, a move that took away women’s constitutional protections for abortion and allowed individual states to take up the issue. More than a dozen states have since enacted laws that restrict or outright ban abortion.
Women’s athletics, particularly at the NCAA level, finds itself in largely uncharted territory.
For decades, when a high school athlete was weighing her options on where to compete collegiately, a given state’s stance on abortion wasn’t a part of the decision-making process. For some young women, now it is.
And if an athlete who becomes pregnant goes to school in a state with strict abortion laws and chooses to tell their coach, the coach may find themself in an increasingly difficult position.
