Allyson Felix and Chloe Kim on Building Careers Through Womens Sports

variety.com:

Cynthia Littleton Business EditorAllyson Felix, the most decorated female track and field athlete in Olympic in history with seven gold medal wins from 2012 to 2021, retired from her sport earlier this year but promptly shifted her focus to a new competitive landscape: the business world.Felix has launched a women’s lifestyle brand, Saysh, that is designed to cater to the needs of female athletes and active women.

Speaking about her career transition at Variety‘s Sports and Entertainment Breakfast on July 21, Felix expressed her excitement for the growing number of opportunities that await star female athletes as media personalities, investors and entrepreneurs when they decide to come off the field.Snowboarding star Chloe Kim, who has two gold medals to date, also appeared at the event, presented by City National Bank at the Maybourne in Beverly Hills, to discuss her burgeoning career as a content producer and the experience of growing up in the public eye as a young female athlete in an unconventional sport.

Felix emphasized that there is, as ever, many issues to scale toward gender equality in sports and business, as demonstrated by Felix’s public conflict with Nike in 2019 over the shoe giant’s lack of maternal leave policy its sponsored athletes.

She called her former sponsor out publicly in a New York Times op-ed, a spur that drove the House of Swoosh to implement her proposal as general policy about five months later.“It just shows the power of your voice and mine,” Felix said during the Q&A with Jenelle Riley, Variety‘s deputy awards and features editor.