Olympian Luuka Jones in action. Photo / Photosport
Olympian Luuka Jones in action. Photo / Photosport
Suzanne McFadden for LockerRoom
It might be one of the most significant advancements ever made in women’s sport.
An initiative five-time Olympian Luuka Jones is calling a “gamechanger” — something she wishes had been available to help her early in her canoe slalom career, to better understand her body.
New Zealand is one of four leading nations in female athlete health who have formed a new alliance, bringing together experts to collaborate and share free, easy-to-understand information with athletes around the world.
The goal is to help athletes address the prevalent health issues facing sportswomen — like RED-S and endometriosis — and to ultimately enhance their performance.
Announced on the eve of International Women’s Day, the partnership — named Global Alliance for Female Athletes (GAFA) — involves sports scientists, researchers and health experts in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. An online hub centralising their research, education and resources on women’s health is now live.
Kiwi athletes like Jones are applauding the breakthrough, which will see more world-leading evidence and information available in areas like periods, pregnancy, contraception, pelvic and bone health, body image and nutrition.
“It’s a gamechanger for women’s sport,” says the recently retired Jones, now women and girls lead for Sport Bay of Plenty. “Certainly, as a young female coming into my sport, I knew nothing about my body.
“This is something that’s so needed, that we’re still rushing to try and catch up on.
“But having access to this information will hopefully create better experiences for females in sport, so they can learn more about their bodies, and how to stay healthy when you’re pushing yourself to the limits to train and perform.”
Dr Helen Fulcher was part of the NZ performance support team at the Paris Olympics. Photo / Supplied
Dr Helen Fulcher, the athlete performance support lead at High Performance Sport NZ, says prioritising female health in sport is long overdue.
“There’s a need for more research and knowledge about female athletes, who for too long have been treated like male athletes,” she says. “And we know females are a different entity.
“As it’s been coming through in research, female athletes have started asking to be looked after differently. They’ve been saying ‘We have periods, we have different hormones and different bodies to males that we have to consider’.”
The concept of an alliance germinated from “organic conversations” between the leaders in female athlete health from the four nations, including Fulcher. It led to HPSNZ partnering with the Australian Institute of Sport, the UK Sports Institute and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee in a historic initiative.
The alliance is a recognition of the momentum of work already done, especially in recent years, Fulcher says, but has been carried out in silos.
“That’s the key about these four nations. We’ve just decided that the silos are actually creating a barrier, where coming together creates a better space for all the work that’s being done in those countries,” she says.
“We’re all trying to achieve the same things with the same value set, but we’re all a bit resource poor. This alliance creates a space where we can actively collaborate, bring people together, so we can know more.”
In recent years, New Zealand has punched above its weight in research in this area. The WHISPA group (Healthy Women in Sport: a Performance Advantage) was formed in 2017 as a multidisciplinary team of experts across sport medicine, physiology, nutrition, sociology, coaching, psychology and endocrinology — whose work was recognised globally.
Ground-breaking research is now underway in HPSNZ and universities throughout the country, in areas like menstrual health, ACL injuries and concussion. There are initiatives like Healthy Women in High Performance Sport — gathering input from athletes, coaches and sports organisations to improve the health, wellbeing and performance of female athletes — and The Flow On Effect, introduced in 2023 to kick start the conversation around periods and physical activity.
Despite the work being done globally to better cater to female athletes’ needs, health literacy — or women understanding how their bodies work — is still poor, says Dr Rachel Harris, the leader in female performance health at the Australian Institute of Sport.
“The gap in knowledge, coupled with widespread information, means athletes often miss the early warning signs and go undiagnosed or are inadequately treated for conditions like endometriosis and dysmenorrhea [painful periods],” Harris says.
“Athletes are then forced to miss training days which reduces their chances of making competition, or in some cases, sees them leave the sport altogether. Our goal is to change this.”
A WHIPSA survey of New Zealand’s top female athletes in 2021 revealed half the athletes had symptoms consistent with irregular menstrual cycles or no periods; almost half had been diagnosed with an iron deficiency; and one in four had had a stress fracture in their careers.
The GAFA initiative will also try to “reduce the noise” of information on athlete health now flooding the internet and social media.
“There’s now a lot of noise in this environment, because people see a gap and want to do good things,” Fulcher says. “But that noise sometimes creates a bit of chaos for the athletes — when they hear a lot of different things on social media.
“We want to reduce that chaos and make this something that’s trusted and safe, and aligned. Somewhere they can read the sensible and safe information they need.”
Jones, a silver medallist in canoe slalom at the Rio Olympics, agrees. “If you go down the track of following misleading advice it can have really major consequences,” she says. “When you’re young, you’re quite influenced by things that come across social media that seem to be successful.”
Jones also hopes coaches and others who support female athletes will tap into GAFA’s collected knowledge.
“It will give them a deeper understanding, which will feed into creating better experiences for the athletes. Everything will be more catered to the female, and in turn, that female should hopefully be healthier and happier,” she says.
“If I’d had this available to me early in my career, I would’ve known how to train better and how to support my health around training. And I could have looked for the signs that maybe things weren’t quite right, like whether I was fuelling enough for the work I was doing.
“You need a basic knowledge of how your body works to recognise when things aren’t healthy. It wasn’t until I started working with experts that I started to gain that knowledge.”
“You’re pushing your body so hard for so many years and you need to be aware of the long-term impact of that as a female. Then in Paris, we saw Lucy Spoors and Brooke Francis win gold as mums coming back to rowing. So there’s that whole side of supporting athletes to be parents, and then through motherhood if they choose to return to sport.”
Kiwi rowers Brooke Francis and Lucy Spoors after finishing with silver at the Paris Olympics. Photo / Iain McGregor, Photosport
If you’re a French cyclist, a Canadian skier, an African sprinter, the information is still available to you — it isn’t only for athletes in the foundational four nations.
“If you’re in a nation where there isn’t medical or health staff working in sport, which we know there are many who don’t have the resources we have, we can gift that information to them,” says Fulcher, a GP who’s also the women’s health clinical lead at HPSNZ.
“It’s free and accessible to everyone – athletes, coaches, parents and sports organisations – across the world, so they’re able to elevate it. We want to build on what we have, and on the things we don’t know about yet.” Researchers and health practitioners from other nations outside the foundational four have already offered their support and resources to the online platform.
Ensuring the information is translatable is another important element for GAFA, Fulcher says.
“It needs to be information that people can understand, and can be shared in other languages over time. And it needs to be consistent information whether you’re in France, Japan or New Zealand,” she says.
As for research that few may know about, Fulcher uses an example from breast health and the performance advantage that’s been discovered in having the correct bra fit – especially in a sport like sprinting. Australian research has found almost 50 percent of elite athletes are wearing sports bras with inadequate support.
“With the correct bra, you’re going to go faster. It’s a pretty simple thing, for a huge gain,” Fulcher says.
“So we need to get that out there to the athletes. We’re helping give them the knowledge and information so they can advocate for what they need and how they need it. And then we educate the sports, so they can get a bra fitting specialist in to see all of their female athletes at once.”
The challenge now is to get people to seek out the information that’s available.
“What is the success of this? It’s when we’re seeing those athletes across the world all competing at a higher level, because of the translatable knowledge we’ve been able to share on an open forum across the globe,” Fulcher says. “And when we have female athletes who are thriving and doing well, which leads to better competition, and more exciting sport.”
