“I’ve often joked with other athletes that there needs to be a WorldTour nursery”, says endurance track cyclist, Elinor Barker, ahead of her third Olympic Games. “Soon, it’ll be quite a good business,” she qualifies - suggesting the idea isn’t entirely comical.
Barker, who races on the road for WorldTour team Uno-X Mobility, makes a good point. The peloton contains a number of new parents. Ellen Van Dijk, who raced the women’s Olympic time trial on Saturday, welcomed her son in October 2023, SD-Worx’s Chantal van den Broek-Blaak’s daughter was born in May 2023; Barker's son Nico is now in his second year. On the men’s side, Victor Campenaerts’ June-born baby was along for the ride at some stages of the 2024 Tour de France.
The conversion has arisen because, for 2024, the Paris Olympics is to have a nursery on-site, a first for the Games. Barker, competing on the track in her third Olympics - having found out she was pregnant at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 - won’t be using the facility; the nursery will be located in the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Village Plaza, and she will be competing in the velodrome.
However, the 29-year-old said it’s a “pretty huge step forward”, adding, “just knowing it’s there sends quite a big message, that people who have kids, and who have responsibilities, can still go to the Olympics, can still compete, [having children] shouldn’t be such a huge barrier.”
Each Olympic cycle is the culmination of - usually four, in this case three - years of lazer sharp focused training. No parent would want to have this concentration scuppered for fear of their child’s wellbeing during the event, “I think it’s quite a big performance advantage, when you don’t need to think about where your kid’s going to be and who is going to look after them.”
Barker, whose son will be at the velodrome during her races, added: “We've had to buy tickets for Nico, that have been about £200 each. [He’ll have] no idea what he’s watching, [and] it's going to be harder for everybody else to watch the races with him there,” she said.
Considering the idea on a larger scale, Barker said: “It would be really cool to see [nurseries on-site] at other events. I've quite often joked with a lot of athletes about how there needs to be a world tour nursery. People base themselves in one place for such a long time, that you’re going to bring kids, or you’re going to fly back and forth all the time.”
The future looks positive, she added, “I do think ‘the juggle’ is getting a lot better, people have a little bit more of an open mind about how it works.”
The track racing at the Olympics will kick off on Monday 5th August, you can see a schedule of all Olympic events here, and read up on how to watch the track events here.
