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At Market Street, much of our work is about protection: helping families safeguard what they have built and the people they love. Yet the families we serve know that legacy rarely stops at the edges of a family. Time and again, we see them use their resources, their voices, and their platforms to widen opportunity for people they may never meet.
That truth came vividly to life when we sat down with Allyson Felix at this year's Game On.
Allyson is the most decorated American track and field athlete in history. She has competed in five Olympic Games and won more World Championship medals than anyone who has ever run. Her signature event, the 200 meters, took about 21 seconds. As she put it to us, that is "21 seconds every four years." Miss that moment, and the next one is four years away.
Yet the most consequential thing Allyson has done took far longer than 21 seconds, and it happened nowhere near a track.
By 2018, Allyson had four Olympic Games and six gold medals behind her, and she felt ready to start a family. But track contracts are tied to performance, and there is no room in them for pregnancy. Before she had told anyone she was expecting, Nike offered her 70% less than her last contract. So she did what many women in her sport had done before her. She hid her pregnancy. She trained at dawn, and when she did leave the house, she wore baggy clothes.
When she shared the news, she stopped negotiating over money and asked instead for maternal protections: time to recover after having a baby without her pay being cut. She was told she could have them, but that every other athlete would be handled on a case-by-case basis. Her daughter then arrived two months early and spent a month in the NICU. Watching her daughter fight gave Allyson the courage to fight too. She wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, and within weeks Nike changed its policy for every athlete it sponsored. Much of the industry followed.
"I had never been the one to speak out on anything," she told us. But motherhood changed that. "There's no way I'm letting my daughter and her generation fight this fight if I can do anything about it."
Securing protection for yourself is prudent. Insisting it become the standard for everyone behind you is legacy.
Speaking out had a cost. After leaving Nike, Allyson still believed she could make another Olympic team, but she could not find a sponsor. In a heart-to-heart with her brother, who is also her business partner, he offered an idea she first thought was absurd: "Well, I think we should just do this ourselves."
Instead of asking the major companies to change, they could build the change from the ground up. They set out to make a running shoe Allyson could compete in. Then their first product engineer, Tiffany Beers, a 13-year Nike veteran, pointed to a much bigger problem. Shoes are built on a last, a mold of a foot, and the industry uses the mold of a man's foot to make women's shoes. The big brands could do better, she explained, but it would double their costs. And because women don't know, women don't ask.
That became Saysh, a company making running shoes fit to the female foot. Its maternity returns policy reflects how differently the company sees women: if your foot changes size during pregnancy, Saysh simply sends you a new pair. At the Tokyo Games, Allyson became the first athlete to compete at the Olympics in a brand she owns. "For the first time in a career that spanned almost 20 years," she said, "I was wearing my own company."
When men ask whether Saysh will make men's shoes, her answer made our room laugh. "You can size up and wear our shoes," she tells them. "We've been wearing your shoes forever."
She and her brother also co-founded Always Alpha, a talent agency that represents only athletes, coaches, and broadcasters in women's sports. At big agencies, she found, women too often got lost. And women's sports deserve their own marketing, rather than the same playbook and the same sponsors once built around Michael Jordan.
Over the past year, Allyson has felt a pull back to the sport. Working out alongside her husband, she watched her times start to fall. She was about to turn 40, and a thought arrived that she could not shake: what if she tried to make the Olympic team in Los Angeles in 2028? This summer, she shared her decision on Michelle Obama's podcast.
It sounded crazy, even to her. She runs two companies and has two young children. But the 2028 track events will be held at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, near where she grew up, where her grandmother used to walk her and her brother through the rose gardens. "One way or another, I'm going to be in that stadium," she said. "I would just be so mad at myself if I didn't give it a try."
She calls it Project Six, for what would be her sixth Olympic Games. And rather than train in private, she chose to do it in public. Talking with friends her age, she sensed something shared. "We weren't our mothers' 40," she told us. The world often suggests that by this point a woman should be living "a softer, quieter life." Allyson decided to flip that on its head.
At first, she felt guilty for wanting something just for herself. The turning point came when Michelle Obama told her, in effect, that doing it because she wants to is reason enough. Men do it all the time. Allyson had felt she needed to attach a greater purpose. She didn't.
What struck us most is how she defines success. "I don't really see the success in just the outcome, but in the courage to try," she said. She has no illusions about being the athlete she once was. Her question is what is possible at 40, and what she can learn about her body, nutrition, and recovery along the way. She plans to document it all and share what she learns. When people tell her she could win one more medal, she gently corrects them. "That's really not what it's about."
Allyson credits Jackie Joyner-Kersee as the most important mentor in her life. Jackie taught her what mentorship looks like: showing up for people quietly, "in the soft moments and in the hard moments." Allyson now does the same for younger athletes, including women navigating pregnancy and a return to their sport, an experience few people have been through. She has found it as meaningful for herself as for them. Mentorship, she said, goes both ways.
Motherhood, she told us, gave her a greater purpose as an athlete. As a young competitor, losing was crushing. Now she knows there are "little eyes on me," and how she picks herself up is a lesson in itself. She wants her children to learn character, integrity, and how to handle defeat by watching her.
When an audience member asked what makes a healthy sports parent, Allyson pointed to her own parents. They never tried to coach her. "They were just parents," she said. They showed up, they supported her, and they let everyone else do their jobs. She admitted, laughing, that she recently caught herself rising off the bleachers to call out directions at her seven-year-old's basketball game. Something tells us she's got this.
It echoes something we see in the families we work with across generations. Values are rarely handed down in conversation. They are demonstrated, and children absorb what they see.
We closed by asking Allyson what she would ask of a room full of advocates for women and girls in sport. Her answer was simple: show up. Go to a professional women's game. Buy the merch.
Allyson's races were measured in seconds. Her legacy will be measured in generations: in the athletes who will never have to train in the dark, in the women who see a 40-year-old mother chase a dream in public, and in the daughter whose world she set out to change.
Whether she reaches the starting line in Los Angeles or cheers from the stands with her children, she has already shown us what she set out to show. The success is not only in the outcome. It is in the courage to try.
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