” Why not ? Let’s turn the table! »: at 40 Allyson Felix ready to come out of retirement to participate in the Los Angeles Games

American Allyson Felix, the most decorated athlete in Olympic history, will come out of retirement to try to qualify for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles, her hometown, where she will be 42, according to an interview with Time magazine on Monday.

The sprinter with 11 Olympic medals, including seven gold, had put away her spikes in 2022 after the Worlds in the United States, but the prospect of participating in the Games at home, in Los Angeles, pushes her to take this gamble. “It’s a unique return to basics,” she told Time. And that’s the only thing that could push me to come back.”

However, to live this “love affair with Los Angeles”, this great figure of American athletics of the last 20 years will have to succeed in making it through the relentless national selections.

“At this age I should probably stay home”

“I know that at 40 I am no longer in my peak form, I have no illusions about that,” she agrees. “At this age I should probably stay home and take care of my kids, but just: why not? Let’s turn the table! Let’s attack, let’s show ourselves vulnerable.”

The athlete, mother of two children aged 7 and 2, has no ambition to participate in meetings regularly on the circuit. But she will still have to run a minimum to be able to access the American selections.

With his long-time coach Bob Kersee, they must establish a training program next October for a return to competition in 2027.

Los Angeles would be the sixth Games for Allyson Felix, who in addition to her 11 Olympic medals has 18 medals at different World Championships.

Her last major competition dates back to the summer of 2021 at the Tokyo Olympics, three years after giving birth to her daughter Camryn in 2018, who required an emergency cesarean section, after only 32 weeks of pregnancy.

Slender (1.68 m, 57 kg), she is “deceptively fragile, because she has an exceptional weight/power ratio,” her trainer Bob Kersee pointed out a few years ago.