The magnificent sight of Liz Young powering through the opening round of the Women’s British Open, her seven-month pregnancy bump wrapped in a bright pink top and her husband, Jonathan, in tow as caddie has been welcomed by experts on pregnancy and elite sports.
“The bottom line is if there are no medical complications or contra-indications – go for it,” said Michael Dooley, a fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, who runs the only clinic on sports and gynaecology, at the King Edward VII hospital in London.
Young, who is expecting a daughter, admitted to tiredness after her opening match at Woburn, but said: “That’s all right, someone has to push me up the hills.” She shot an impressive one-over-par 73 in the first round.
Young is ranked 269 in the world. She had not intended to continue playing so late into her pregnancy, but qualified by finishing 18th at a tournament in the Czech Republic. She plans to return to golf next year, when she will be one of a handful of mothers among the hundreds of female professional golfers on the European circuit.
Dooley said there was no reason why elite athletes should not continue to compete even into the last month of pregnancy. “The crucial advice is listen to your body. As long as she has no complications, is feeling fit and well, has taken medical advice, and looks after her hydration, there is no reason why she should not continue. Then, if she feels there is any problem, just pull out – but I’m sure she won’t do that.”
Dooley was one of the international experts in a recent study commissioned by the International Olympic Committee on pregnancy and elite sports, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, which suggested that competitors could increase their physical capacity during pregnancy.
The study was led by Professor Kari Bø, of the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences, who said golf was an excellent low-impact sport in pregnancy, but noted that Young was reporting lower back pain, a common problem when the abdominal muscles stretch and distort and cannot offer the same support.
Bø and Dooley found that so little research had been done on elite sports and pregnancy that it was hard to set rules for how long athletes should continue at competition level, or how soon after delivery they should return to the sport – the subject of their next report.
However, both said that even extreme exercise had many benefits for healthy pregnant women and did no harm to the foetus.
Bø is a former Nordic team champion in rhythmic gymnastics, and was a team coach when pregnant with her own son. She joined the team in the warm-up routines five times a week, which included classical ballet exercises, jogged until her sixth month, and was using her exercise bicycle and doing the splits almost up to the day she gave birth. “I had a very easy pregnancy,” she told the Guardian. “Not everyone is as lucky.”
Dooley said it was crucial for women athletes not to attempt to conceal pregnancy, fearing that they might be judged unfit, particularly in team sports. “If the pregnancy is acknowledged from the start, any problems can be recognised and resolved at once,” he said.
The Scottish Olympic runner Liz McColgan won gold at 10,000 metres in the 1991 World Championships in Tokyo, and the New York marathon months later, a year after giving birth to her daughter Eilish, who ran in the steeplechase in the 2012 London Olympics.
Other UK athletes who returned soon after giving birth include Paula Radcliffe, who won the New York marathon in 2007, ten months after her daughter, Isla, was born. She was back to running 12 days after the birth, but this was “too soon”, she conceded, and she waited three-and-a-half weeks after her son, Raphael, was born.
