Review: ‘She Runs the World,’ starring Allyson Felix

June 8, 2025

by Carla Hay

“She Runs the World”

Directed by Perri Peltz and Matthew O’Neill

Culture Representation: The documentary film “She Runs the World” features a predominantly African American group of people (with a few white people) who are connected in some way to champion track and field athlete Allyson Felix.

Culture Clash: In 2018, Felix took a big risk in her career by taking on her then-sponsor Nike with public criticisms about the pregnancy clauses in Nike’s sponsorship contract and by becoming an activist for maternity rights for professional athletes.

Culture Audience: “She Runs the World” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of Felix and are interested in documentaries about athletes who became activists.

“She Runs the World” is an inspiring documentary about track-and-field champion Allyson Felix’s challenges in attaining Olympic gold medals and her maternity rights activism for sponsored athletes. More perspectives would’ve made this a better film. The only people interviewed in the movie are Felix, her husband, her parents, her brother, and a few past and present colleagues.

Directed by Perri Peltz and Matthew O’Neill, “She Runs the World” had its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. Felix retired as a professional athlete in 2022, at the age of 36. The documentary mostly covers Felix’s life as a professional athlete, although there is some mention in the beginning of the film about her childhood.

Felix is known for being the most decorated woman in Olympic track and field history and the most decorated American track and field athlete in Olympic history. She’s won 11 Olympic medals, seven of which are gold medals. Felix has 20 career medals (seven from individual events and 13 from team events) from the World Athletic Championships, making her the most decorated athlete in World Athletic Championships history.

Early on in “She Runs the World,” Felix makes a statement that can describes how she’s been such a high achiever: “I like it when people tell me I can’t do something because I’m going to show you that I can.” The documentary shows that many times in her life, Felix proved her doubters and critics wrong. And she made some history along the way.

Born in Los Angeles on November 18, 1985, Felix wasn’t an athlete who had a parent pushing her into sports. Her parents Paul Felix (a pastor) and Marlean Felix (a schoolteacher) say that they weren’t very enthusiastic about Allyson’s interest in athletics, but they didn’t discourage her either. Paul and Marlean describe Allyson as a sweet child, which is why she had the nickname Shug, short for Sugar.

In high school, Allyson broke many national records. In 2004, a year after graduating from high school, she won a silver medal at the Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece. She was the first female track and field athlete to become a professional after graduating from high school, but she also still found the time to get a university education. In 2008, Allyson graduated from the University of Southern California, degree in elementary education. That same year, she won her first Olympic gold medal. In 2010, Nike became her main sponsor.

“She Runs the World” dutifully shows the highlights from the rest of Allyson’s track-and-field competitions. But many times, the documentary looks like a long promotional video because it makes Allyson look like she has a close-to-flawless personality. Just by the way she’s presented in the documentary, her biggest insecurity (or strength, depending on your perspective) is that she’s very hard on herself and always wants to be the best in everything that she does.

For example, when she won a silver medal at her very first Olympics in 2004, everyone else around her seemed to be happy and proud for her, but she admits that she hid her disappointment on camera. She says in the documentary about not winning a gold medal for her first Olympics: “I felt like I failed. I felt like I let the country [the United States] down.”

Jackie Joyner-Kersee, another Olympic champion in track and field, is one of the people interviewed in the documentary. Joyner-Kersee says she considers herself a mentor of Allyson, whom Joyner-Kersee describes as “very shy but very determined.” Joyner-Kersee further comments on Allyson: “She somewhat reminds me of herself.”

Also interviewed in the documentary are Allyson’s former coaches: Bob Kersee (Joyner-Kersee’s husband) became Allyson’s coach when she turned pro. Pat Connolly was Allyson’s coach in high school. Naturally, they praise Allyson too.

Even the love story of Allyson and her husband Kenneth Ferguson is presented as idyllic. They were friends from high school and a romance developed between them later. The couple got married in 2018. Ferguson seems content and secure with being married to someone famous. In the documentary, Ferguson says of Allyson: “I don’t see her as a public figure. I see her as just her.”

Allyson’s athletic accomplishments have gotten a lot of media coverage, so the documentary doesn’t reveal anything new in that respect. “She Runs the World” is at its most interesting when it covers the riskiest thing that Allyson did in her career: Speak out against her then-sponsor Nike and demand salary protections for pregnant athletes.

Prior to the changes that Allyson helped make in how pregnant athletes were treated by their sponsors, she and Joyner-Kersee say in the documentary that sponsors usually canceled or reduced payments for professional female-track-and-field athletes if these women got pregnant. It’s one of the reasons why many professional female athletes wait until they retire if they want to get pregnant. There was also no paid maternity leave for these athletes.

“Pregnancy in sport has always been the kiss of death,” retired hurdler Joanna Hayes says in the documentary. Hayes, who won a gold medal at the 2004 Olympics, comments on how being a professional athlete affected her family planning: “I wanted to have kids earlier, but I was afraid to do it.” Hayes says she waited to have kids after she retired as a professional athlete.

Allyson and her older brother Wes Felix (who became her agent early on in her career) candidly speak about the volatile contract negotiations that motivated Allyson to speak out about maternity rights for professional athletes. Wes, who is two years older than Allyson, says he’s always felt protective and proud of her. He says he became her agent because he felt he was the best person for the job.

In 2016, even after winning another gold medal that year, Nike reduced her pay by 60%, according to Wes and Allyson. “I felt discarded,” Allyson said of the pay cut that she thought was an insult to her, considering all that she had accomplished as an athlete. It’s not quite said out loud in the documentary, but the implication is that women athletes who get older can get more negative financial penalties than their male counterparts who get older.

In 2018, when Allyson got pregnant with her first child, Nike stipulated in the contract that if she didn’t make it onto the podium” (getting first, second or third place) in a major competition within eight months after giving birth, then her salary would be reduced by an additional 25%. Allyson told Nike that if Nike was going to give her that additional 25% pay cut, then Nike could no longer use her image in marketing campaigns. Nike disageed and wanted to be able to use her image in the campaigns even if she got that additional 25% pay cut.

The contract negotiations reached a stalemate. And that’s when Allyso decided to speak out. A turning point was her New York Times opinion-editorial essay, titled “My Own Nike Pregnancy Story,” which was published on May 22, 2019. In the article she openly gave criticism about discriminatory policies that major sponsors such as Nike have toward pregnant athletes and called for changes in contracts to have pregnancy/maternity rights.

The article opened the floodgates for more women and allies to speak out about pregnancy/maternity rights for sponsored athletes. But speaking out in the first place was a risk because Allyson and her supporters didn’t know what type of backlash she would get. Wes says in the documentary, “We didn’t have the words for what we were dealing with: maternity protection.”

In the end, Nike and other sponsors changed their policies to give paid maternity leave and other maternity rights for athletes. By 2019, Allyson decided to move on from Nike and opted not to renew her contract. And even though she made it onto the Olympic team in 2020 (the 2020 Summer Olympics were postponed until 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic), she couldn’t get any sponsors.

Wes says companies told him that they rejected Allyson because she was too closely associated with Nike. But were the rejections also because of her outspoken activism about maternity rights for athletes? The documentary lets viewers make up their own minds.

But true to Allyson’s nature, she turned an obstacle into an opportunity. Instead of feeling defeated by her lack of sponsorship, she decided to start her own athletic lifestyle shoe brand: Saysh. Tiffany Beers, a former Nike designer, became her business partner in this venture. Beers is interviewed in the documentary and talks about how Saysh defied the industry norms of making female shoes smaller versions of shoes made originally for men.

Allyson gave birth to her first child—a daughter named Camryn Grace—in November 2018 The documentary also includes family video footage of the ordeal that Allyson and her family went through when Camryn was born prematurely (at 32 weeks old) because of severe preeclampsia, which includes hypertension and organ dysfunction. Allyson had to have a C-section. Camryn (whose heart stopped a few times) was put in intensive care for a few weeks until she was ready to go home.

This experience motivated Allyson to become an advocate for maternity health care—particularly for black women, who are much more likely than white women to die in childbirth or from pregnancy complications. The documentary doesn’t show too much of Allyson’s activism for maternity health care. It’s one of the areas where “She Runs the World” seems to be inadequate. (Allyson’s second child—a son named Kenneth Maurice Ferguson III, nicknamed Trey—was born in April 2024. The documentary shows Allyson telling her husband that about this pregnancy.)

Although “She Runs the World” is ultimately a feel-good documentary, it’s a little too insular to be comprehensive. A broader perspective was needed instead of just interviewing people who’ve been close to Allyson. For example, one of the ways the documentary could have been more well-rounded is by interviewing at least one or two female athletes who don’t know Allyson but whose lives have been affected by pregnancy clauses in sponsorship deals. And at least one other sports agent should’ve been interviewed. Nike’s perspective is also left out of the documentary.

As it stands, “She Runs the World” isn’t as extraordinary as Allyson herself. The documentary did not need to be a tabloid-styled movie or a “tell-all” exposé biography. But for a documentary that keeps praising Allyson for all the changes she made to the sports industry, there are surprisingly no interviews with people outside of Allyson’s inner circle to talk about those changes. It’s a competently made movie but so much more could have been told that is not in this documentary.