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Gold Medal Motherhood

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  February 09, 2026 10:00 AM

With the Olympics underway in Italy, there will be countless stories about athletes overcoming adversity and winning big on the world stage. One of those stories is Italian skater Francesca Lollobrigida, who just won the gold for Team Italy in the women’s speed skating 3000m event.

She also did it on her 35th birthday, with her young son Tommaso watching from the stands. And now Lollobrigida has a message for other women: she didn't have to choose between a family, being a mom, and being a world-class Olympic athlete.

Speaking in Italian, Lollobrigida said, "I'm really proud of myself for not giving up this season, because it was supposed to be the perfect season." She had to pause as her very excited son demanded her attention.

"Wait a minute," Lollobrigida tells the tot, before continuing, "It wasn't because a virus is something you don't expect it happened to me and I really wanted to quit. I mean, I didn't want to show up here. But my husband and my family were there for me and told me not to give up. To believe in my dreams, to fight a new challenge. Even more so, and so I really enjoyed everything. I had fun. I laughed during the competition."

Here's more from The New York Times:

Italian long track speedskater Francesca Lollobrigida took it all in: the fans, the green, white and red flag wrapped around her back, and her 2-year-old son, Tommaso, perched on her hip.

“I think it’s the perfect day,” said Lollobrigida, who celebrated her 35th birthday by winning the host nation’s first gold medal at these Games on Saturday in a thrilling women’s 3,000-meter race. “It’s incredible, the dream of my dreams.”

A night removed from the official start of the Olympics, Lollobrigida stole the show on Day 1, turning in an Olympic record time of 3 minutes, 54.28 seconds, more than two seconds ahead of silver medalist Ragne Wiklund of Norway (3:56.54) to win her first career gold medal. Canadian Valérie Maltais took bronze (3:56.93).

“It’s not that easy to combine being a skater and a mom,” said Lollobrigida, who estimated she’s away from home roughly 250 days a year. “This (medal) is for myself, the people who believed in me, and the people who said, ‘Maybe she can’t do it, you know?’ They gave me the power to prove myself.”

"I was really enjoying myself and happy," Lollobrigida added. 

Every single parent has been there, too, when your child demands your attention at the precise moment you have something else important going on. But Lollobrigida handled him with the patience and grace that comes with motherhood. This is an image that more women need to see.

We are far too often told that children are a burden, a hindrance to our dreams and ambitions, an obstacle to be overcome rather than a joy. Aftyn Behn, who ran a failed campaign for Tennessee's 7th Congressional District, called family life and motherhood a "deeply patriarchal structure" and said, "But also, the deeply patriarchal structures that these women are involved with because they've chosen marriage and they've chosen to raise children," she added. "And I think in the south it's incredibly difficult to shake those."

That comes from the Left. 

But some on the Right are not much better. Many point out that the boy is misbehaving in the video, and he is. But their solution is that he needs "more mothering" — an implication that Lollobrigida should forgo her athletic career for this, and a bad mother because her child isn't perfectly behaved in this one moment. She mentions a husband, and he should also have a role in disciplining their son. Yet the boy is young and in a high-energy environment he doesn't understand. A strange man is sticking a weird object in his mom's face, and after watching her from a distance, he just wants her attention. Every single parent has been there, and anyone who says their children didn't misbehave publicly is lying.

But the message women get from both sides is overwhelmingly negative and yet surprisingly similar: from the Left, they're told motherhood is oppressive, and the Right tells them it has to be oppressive. And then we wonder why fewer women are choosing to have children. 

It's a total mystery.

Not. 

Women, by and large, have an innate need to mother. It's why so many childless Leftist women have taken to using their toxic empathy to "mother" criminals and illegal immigrants or "fur babies." That urge is there, no matter how they try to deny it. Then I think of this video, of a woman who reportedly didn't want kids getting very emotional holding a baby for the first time.

I remember holding my eldest after he was born. I had little experience with babies. I was only two years older than my only sibling, so I didn't recall his infancy. But something just...clicked. Even my nurses noticed it. I'd do it again if I could.

No, motherhood is not easy. I've raised three boys, and for the last two years, completely by myself, as their father passed away after a brief illness. Yes, you have to make sacrifices. But you don't have to give up everything, and you can find a balance that works for you.

You cannot "have it all," and anyone who says otherwise is kidding you. But you can have some of it, and that some can be very, very good. I was able to work, get a Master's degree, while my eldest was a toddler and my middle son was a newborn. With three of them, I went to nursing school and had a career. Now, I am a full-time writer. There were long days, but it worked. We've had some really good times: we went to Hawaii together, we've seen Mount Rushmore, and played mini golf in the mountains of Tennessee. Last Friday, I took my son to a movie and we took those goofy (and overpriced) photos in a booth in the theater lobby. They're hanging on my fridge now.

In the end, the good times and the happiness far outweigh the struggles, the sacrifices, and the hard times.

Imagine if we gave women that realistic and more optimistic view of motherhood, of careers, of passion pursuits like Lollobrigida's? Women would be happier, and the world would be a better place.