This was supposed to be a very different story. When Alex Morgan, World Cup champion and Olympic gold medalist, announced she was pregnant following the epic victory tour of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT) last summer, she followed it up with a goal so audacious you’d have to be a little crazy to believe it: Be physically and mentally ready—Olympian ready—to play for the United States and win a gold medal in Tokyo mere weeks after giving birth. No pressure.
It wasn’t an impossible idea—especially for a woman who’s built a career on demolishing every “impossible” goal she’s ever set for herself. At 22, Morgan made her World Cup debut with the USWNT as the youngest player on the roster. She’s since scored more than 100 international goals, won two World Cups and one Olympic gold medal, and become one of the most recognizable faces in American sports. In 2016 she was one of five players to file an official complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging gender discrimination by U.S. Soccer. By the time the whole team officially sued their employers in 2019, the 30-year-old had emerged as one of the loudest voices in the most visible fight for equal pay in a generation.
When we first met in Los Angeles in February, her 32-weeks-pregnant belly impossible to ignore, much of Morgan’s life was up in the air. She didn’t know where she’d be living (her husband, also a professional soccer player, was in the middle of negotiations to sign with a new team); how she was going to set up her nursery (the nesting impulse hadn’t kicked in yet); or how the hell she was going to manage the logistical nightmare of having a newborn on the biggest athletic stage in the world (would she pump at halftime?).
But she was certain about three things: She’d be giving birth to a baby girl in April, she would be competing at the Olympics less than three months after that, and she would figure out all the details eventually.
But then, of course, everything changed.
On March 24, the International Olympic Committee announced that in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the Games will be postponed to 2021, bringing Morgan’s molten-hot momentum to a skidding halt. “Overall it’s just the right decision,” she says when we speak by phone within hours of the announcement, calm despite the monumental decision. Days earlier, the U.S. Olympic Committee asked athletes to weigh in on a potential postponement. “I tried to look at it more from a team perspective, but I couldn’t help but think of myself with all of the stress that’s going on from the coronavirus on top of trying to get back in shape in such a short amount of time.” Taking all factors into account, she voted to postpone. “That’s the best decision to level the playing field for all athletes in all events.”
Morgan’s image as America’s soccer sweetheart, with the pink headband and a perfect ponytail, doesn’t always do her justice. Yes, she’s friendly and polite, the kind of person who asks whether she’s pronouncing your name correctly and then uses it in conversation. But she also has a relentlessness about her, her drive like the scorching tail of a comet ripping through the headlines and leaving the rest of us wondering how she does it.
“She’s all or nothing in every aspect of her life,” says Morgan’s husband, Servando Carrasco. “She approaches everything with an insane amount of work ethic. I've never seen someone work as hard as her.” Carrasco met Morgan at the University of California, Berkeley, where they both played. “She was coming off an ACL injury, and she recovered in six months, which, if you know anything about sports, that's pretty crazy,” he says. “She was playing the first game of the season with a brace like RoboCop—she just had that drive and that hunger to be the best.”
That’s the first thing you need to know about Morgan. “When she was maybe about nine years old,” says Jenny Morgan, her older sister, “she would have a notepad and be counting all of her crunches while watching TV. She would be doing squats, lunges—I mean, at nine years old!” She’s always been her own biggest competitor. “She would sit in her room for four hours and play Monopoly to try to beat herself,” Jenny says. “She’s always been like that.”
At eight months pregnant, Morgan is facing the fact that she’s done everything in her power to be ready for the field only for the chance to disappear in the list of canceled moments that have characterized 2020. But like the steely competitor she is, she’s comfortingly unrattled by the whole thing—and already looking to the next goal. “We can only hypothesize over so much uncertainty in the future,” she says. Whether the next chance to play comes in the next three months or in the next year, she’ll be ready. “If I have no goal to try to achieve” she says, “then that’s not true to the core of who I am.”
Morgan kept up with her regular training schedule (which included six days a week of intense workouts—on-the-field sessions, weight training, Spin classes, runs) until she was seven months pregnant before letting off the gas to adopt an easier version of that routine (regular jogs, physical therapy, pelvic-floor physical therapy, prenatal yoga). Still, the idea that she’d risk her run for the gold to do something as predictable and potentially limiting as getting pregnant drew critics.
“Casual fans of the game were just like, ‘Why would she do something like that during the peak of her career?’” Morgan says when we meet in February for smoothie bowls at The Source Café, a favorite hometown spot in L.A., before postponing the Olympics even seemed like a possibility. “It’s not like women can’t do both—our bodies are incredible—it’s the fact that this world isn’t really set up for women to thrive,” she says. “That was one thing where I was like, ‘Do I want to be public with this?’ This is my body, my family, my life.”
Simply by virtue of the fact that she’s a woman with a job, Morgan finds herself the subject of that tired old debate: Can she really be a mom and stay at the top of her game? “I thought to myself, I have the support in place to be able to come back,” she says. “There’s no reason for me to stop just to start a family.”
The reality is most women can’t even attempt goals like Morgan’s. Even if you take her champion physique out of the equation, she has a huge amount of privilege: She’s wealthy—following the advice of Serena Williams, she could hire a night nurse to help make sure she’s not sleep-deprived on the job; she’s white—the unsettling truth is that in the U.S., white women are less likely to experience maternal health complications than women of color; and she has a killer support system—an entire organization of professional trainers, doctors, and nutritionists on top of all the family and friends already on Team Alex.
But her advantages are part of the reason she’s set on continuing to challenge herself—especially in motherhood. “I want to be open about my journey because I want women to feel like they don’t have to choose one or the other,” she says. “The more female athletes that are moms in their career, the better—from Allyson Felix, to Serena Williams, to my teammate Sydney Leroux. The more challenged the system, the more it will change.”
Even with an intense drive like Morgan’s, there’s only so much about a pregnancy—or the state of the world—you can plan. “In sports you’re told to just control the controllables,” she says. On the field you can’t control the weather or the quality of the turf. You can’t control how well your teammates play, or how perfectly the ball comes to you. “You have to control your attitude, your life, your mindset,” she says. “You have to trust in the process, in yourself, in the support system that you’ve created.”
In all the time I spend talking to Morgan, I’m struck by how incredibly calm she is—even in times that feel scarily uncertain for all of us. She was unfazed about moving across the country at eight months pregnant (and in the face of worrisome travel restrictions) to join her husband in Florida after he signed with a new team. Undaunted by the challenge of performing at the top of her game as a sleep-deprived new mom. Unvexed by the idea that so many of the things we thought we could control actually aren’t in our control at all.
She’ll need that mindset more than ever now, just weeks away from giving birth in a climate marked by fear. As hospitals race to stem the spread of COVID-19, some are barring all visitors—including spouses, partners, families, and doulas—from the delivery room. “That definitely scared me,” Morgan says. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable delivering without my husband or my doula, but especially my husband.”
Her plan was to have a natural birth—“I should be able to give birth without numbing my body,” she says. “I’ve gone through a lot of major sports injuries and endured a lot of pain, but nothing is going to be like childbirth. I feel like if I don’t experience that, then I’ll never really know what I can do, what I’m capable of.” And to do it in a hospital. But if her husband isn’t able to be in the room, it would be a deal breaker—and the second major life plan in a month she’ll have to part with. “That has been a big discussion with my husband, with my mom, with my team of care—What do I do?” she says. “I would love to give birth at home and have such an intense but beautiful moment of life there.”
There’s a certain amount of grace in being forced to let go of your plans—maybe even a little bit of relief. “As I've gotten closer to my due date, I’ve gone through so many scenarios,” Morgan says. What if she was still pregnant at 41 weeks, losing seven precious days of recovery time before she needed to be back on the field? What if she couldn’t get the balance of caring for herself and caring for her daughter just right?
Now there really is no immediate pressure, at least in terms of the Olympics. “There are a hundred things that have been going through my mind,” she says. “Now I have more time to deal, and I’ll have more time with my daughter without the endless questions. I can figure it out with a little more calm and a little more clarity. I have to look to the positives.” That means the deferral of an Olympic-size dream—but Morgan is using the same resiliency that would have taken her to the gold to find the silver lining.
As much as her on-the-field goals have made her an icon, they don’t define her. It’s that relentless drive to push for more, better, impossible, that defines her—and she has no shortage of things to keep pushing for (from a socially safe distance, of course).
For starters, the fight for equal pay she’s helped lead will likely—finally—be resolved in the next several weeks. U.S. Soccer has been supportive during her pregnancy, she says, despite the fact that relations between the players and their employer appear to be breaking down. Earlier this month court documents filed in the equal-pay lawsuit filed by the team showed that U.S. Soccer cited biological differences in their argument for not paying the women’s team equally. (In the wake of the revelations, president of U.S. Soccer Carlos Cordeiro has resigned.)
But Morgan is hyperaware of what happens when women work together, building on one another’s accomplishments. When Olympic runners Alysia Montaño, Allyson Felix, and Kara Goucher spoke out about Nike’s lack of maternity protections for athletes, the company changed its policy. It was a huge victory for women. “It really brought up an important point that a lot of brands who have male executives in place don’t think of initially,” says Morgan, who is a Nike-sponsored athlete. “My Nike contract was up and we just re-signed for a long period, and they’re extremely supportive.” Her new contract includes impressive maternity protections: 18 months of guaranteed pay that cannot be reduced even if she can’t compete, according to contract details shared with Glamour.
Morgan’s determined to make sure the next generation of women has even more support than she does, which is why she’s launching a content company later this year with the goal of giving women in sports a platform to tell their stories. “I don't remember being informed about the discrimination that girls and women face in sports when I was younger,” she says. “But now I see eight year olds with posters saying, ‘Go Alex, thank you for giving me a better future.’ I can't wait to share all these stories with my daughter and be able to tell her a little piece of history that mom had to fight for.”
When you take a step back, you realize that not even uncertainty on an epic global scale can change Alex Morgan. It was never about some dramatic comeback or history-making victory. She’s just focusing on the things that are in her power to control and continuing to do what she’s done every day of her professional career: show up and go for the goal.
Macaela MacKenzie is a senior editor at Glamour.
