Being athlete-mother has not a bar to success in shot circle

London, March 2 : Just six months after giving birth to her first child, double Olympic champion Dame Valerie Adams snared a silver medal at the 2018 Commonwealth Games.
Two years after giving birth to twins, former world champion Christina Schwanitz returned to win bronze at the 2019 World Athletics Championship in Doha, and another mum making her mark is Portugal’s 2021 world number one Auriol Dongmo, who will this week be gunning for gold at the European Indoor Championships in Torun.
Since Dongmo gave birth to her son in June 2018, balancing motherhood and training has clearly brought the best out of the 30-year-old Portuguese thrower.
On her return to international competition in 2020 she set no less than six national records (two indoors and four outdoor marks) and hurled the 4kg shot out to a best of 19.53m to end the year joint number one on the world lists. She has built further on that form during the 2021 indoor campaign, unbeaten for the year highlighted by a Portuguese record and world leading mark of 19.65m in Karlsruhe.
So what role has being a mum played in Dongmo’s success over the past couple of seasons? “It has made me more open to seeing things from another perspective. I now have an extra motivation to fight not only for myself but also my son. This has made me more resilient and more focused in my desire to achieve better results,” she explains.