The protruding belly getting its closeup early in “She Runs the World” belongs to Allyson Felix, the world’s most decorated track star. It’s 2018, Felix is 32 and pregnant for the first time. In direct address, she talks about what she wants people to take away from her story — a story about starting a family during a stellar professional career and about the way the sports industry had made it hard for female athletes to choose parenting.
“I love when people say I can’t do something,” says Felix, her hair pulled up, her smile lucent. She is wearing a dark gray T-shirt with the word “Equality” embossed in gold. “Because I’m going to show you that I can.”
“She Runs the World,” directed by Perri Peltz and Matthew O’Neill, joins a squad of documentaries that feature the stories of elite female athletes while leveraging lessons about equality and pay equity, among them “LFG” (about the National Women’s Soccer Team’s push for equal pay) and “Sue Bird: In the Clutch” (about the WNBA and the legendary point guard, who is an exec producer here). Or “an industry still made mostly by and for men,” as Felix wrote in a New York Times opinion piece. The op-ed “My Own Nike Pregnancy Story” arrived quick on the heels of a Times investigative piece about how Nike had been treating its female athletes. “I’ve been one of Nike’s most widely marketed athletes. If I can’t secure maternity protections, who can?” she asked.
How did Felix become one of the global faces of the brand? “She Runs the World” answers that question early on while keeping in sight the film’s larger societal aims about motherhood and labor.
What may come as a surprise to viewers — it certainly came as one to her high school track coach — is the way in which Felix appears to have stumbled into track and field. Her older brother Wes ran, but hers wasn’t a childhood dream, she says. Home movies underscore a playful youth rooted in church. One of the charms here is how the film and Felix herself never fully crack the code of her drive. The first third of the documentary could be mistaken for a straightforward portrait of a supreme athlete, complete with that secret sauce that can never be fully deconstructed. There are the constitutive ingredients: her tightknit and loving parents — Marlean, an elementary school teacher, and Paul, a pastor— and their faith and the protective love of Wes.
In high school, Felix becomes increasingly intentional about her talents. She sets world records at 17. She goes to the University of Southern California but doesn’t compete on its team, opting instead to turn professional. Her first Olympic medals — in Athens and then Beijing — aren’t cause for celebration: They’re silver, and she’s a perfectionist.
Providing insights on what makes Felix so good on the track, but also on the many challenges she faced once she committed to having a family: Olympian Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Bob Kersee, her coach.
Early in Allyson career, Wes becomes her agent. The Felix siblings’ tag team is one of the most intriguing, often touching, throughlines in “She Runs the World.” Nike comes courting. The sports apparel titan even has a new campaign: “The Girl Effect.” The contracts for track competitors can be very specific about performance benchmarks, with bonuses for medaling and reductions when they don’t.
Having not yet won a gold at the Olympics, Felix hires track-and-field magician Bob Kersee and wins a gold and then another and another at London Olympics. Everything is going well and Felix and her husband, Kenneth Ferguson, are thinking about starting their family. (Ferguson had us when he wiped a tear in a video taken as they were about to exchange wedding vows.)
She didn’t take much of a training break when she tore a hamstring, or when she tore ligaments in her ankle. She kept winning. So, when what Wes thought would happen with a new Nike contract doesn’t — there was a proposed dramatic reduction — it was a shock. “All the pictures, all the photos, all the medals had already been done,” said onetime coach Pat Connoly. “The medals were already around Nike’s neck. She was a Nike commodity.” During these tense negotiations, Allyson and Kenneth learn she’s pregnant.
The contractual wrangling takes a back seat in the film once Allyson experiences complications. In addition to sharing DNA with other women-in-sports docs, “She Runs the World” also shares kinship with 2022’s “Aftershock,” the riveting, often heartrending documentary on Black maternal health care (whose co-director, Tonya Lewis Lee, is an executive producer here). The documentary takes a tender turn when Felix must have an emergency C-section.
Felix’s New York Times piece ran in May 2019. A couple of months later, Nike unveiled a new policy that guaranteed protections for pregnant athletes. Other companies followed suit, but Felix and her brother were still in negotiations with the company. “The easy thing to do was to still be a Nike athlete and all that goes with it,” her mother Marlean Felix says. But one of the many lessons of “She Runs the World” is that taking it easy isn’t what Allyson Felix is about. This is a portrait of a world-record holder who became a world-class advocate.
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