Lessons from the Track: What Sporting Negotiations Reveal About Workplace Inequities

The athletes have crossed the finish line. The crowd is roaring. The post-race analysis begins. But while the focus of post-event discussions may include pacing, tactics and career milestones, little thought is given to how track and field athletes finance their careers — or the inequities in pay and conditions they face away from the track.

It’s something that Allison Louise Elias, assistant professor of business administration at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, explores in her recent writing on pay and performance for female athletes. And it turns out that behind all great sporting moments lie tricky negotiations with large corporations.

In delving into her subject, Elias reveals that medals and celebrity do not necessarily shield athletes from gender discrimination in compensation and pay structure. Hammering out sporting financial arrangements, she finds, raises tough questions on everything from performance-based pay structures to how an athlete’s promotional value to a company’s brand is reflected in sponsorship contracts. Adding to this complexity is the fact that women are traditionally underrepresented in sport.

“It’s an extreme case of gender segregation, which can lead to the devaluing of women’s work,” says Elias.

Her latest case, “Negotiating with Nike: Allyson Felix Encounters the ‘Kiss of Death” —presented in two parts and co-written with research assistant Rowena Kosher — examines pay-for-performance issues in depth.

“We take for granted that certain jobs pay certain salaries, but we rarely step back to consider the basis for compensation systems and incentive arrangements,” says Elias.

While centered on elite athletics, the case raises questions about fair compensation that extend into nearly every industry: Who deserves more pay and why? What happens when compensation systems collide with life events such as illness, injury or pregnancy? How should organizations evaluate performance when employees take leave for caregiving or health reasons? And who should assume responsibility for this?

Elias plans to teach the case in her MBA electives and in executive education programs such as Women in Leadership. The case, she says, allows for theoretical debate about pay systems while offering practical lessons about leverage in a negotiation process.

How Felix Landed at Nike — And What She Expected

The case follows Olympian Allyson Felix, the world’s most decorated athlete in women’s track and field, as she negotiates her sponsorship contract with Nike. Felix sought to strengthen maternity and postpartum recovery protections for herself while setting a precedent from which less well-known athletes might benefit.

Elias enters Felix’s story in 2010 when her contract with Adidas expired. Attracted by Nike’s Girl Effect campaign, which focused on empowering adolescent girls, particularly in developing countries, she signed with the company. In December 2017, when her contract with Nike expired, she and her brother Wes, who was her agent, assumed her compensation would fall because at 32 she had limited years left to compete. They expected to sign one more contract with Nike.

Then, in the spring of 2018, while in negotiations for the new contract, Felix and her husband, Kenneth Ferguson, learned she was pregnant, something they decided not to disclose (one racer had called pregnancy “the kiss of death” for track and field athletes) until they knew more about the terms Nike was proposing.

After Nike proposed a dollar amount that was 70% less than it had been in Felix’s previous contract (even before the company knew about Felix’s pregnancy), she and her brother used her brand value to push for an increase. The question was whether, once Nike learned Felix was pregnant, she could secure maternity protection and avoid reduction clauses, which allow pay cuts to be triggered by injuries or failure to achieve certain level of performance.

Negotiation Through the Lens of Sport

For Elias, the case illustrates principles of negotiation that apply beyond elite athletics. In particular, she was interested in the decision of athletes to speak out against unfair treatment, despite the risks posed by the terms of their non-disclosure agreements. Felix’s story shows students how negotiators can gain leverage through information release, coalition building and coordinated action, she says.

For Felix, a key moment was when two track stars and new mothers, Alysia Montaño and Kara Goucher, decided to breach their NDAs and go public with their grievances in videos and op-eds. Still in negotiations with Nike, Felix wanted to follow suit and set a precedent by not only securing exemption from reduction clauses in the months before and after childbirth, which tennis star Serena Williams had done, but also by insisting that these contract provisions explicitly use the language of maternity.

She was torn between accepting the company’s offer, which came with protections but without maternity language, seeking another company’s backing or making her story public, despite the risk this posed to her ability to find another sponsor.

In November 2018, life-threatening preeclampsia meant Felix had to undergo an emergency C-section. Her daughter Camryn, born weighing 3lbs 7oz, spent her first month in a neonatal intensive care unit. The experience confirmed Felix’s commitment to pregnancy advocacy. On May 22, 2019 — while still in negotiations with Nike, meaning she had no NDA to breach — The New York Times published her story.

What surprised Elias from her interview with Felix was the mismatch between corporate messaging and companies’ treatment of pregnancy in contracts. “Allyson told me that one of the reasons she was attracted to signing with Nike was its focus on advancing women and girls in sports,” she says. “Yet that was happening when track and field athletes were facing what they saw as very unfair treatments with regard to their pregnancies.”

The decision to breach nondisclosures and publish grievances with Nike allowed Felix and fellow runners Montaño and Gaucher to control the public narrative and question Nike’s commitment to advancing women and girls.

In the end, the mismatch led Felix to sign with Athleta, a women-only apparel brand owned by Gap. While Nike had eventually agreed to give Felix pregnancy protections, Athleta offered a contract that provided full maternity protection as well as opportunities to participate women’s empowerment initiatives.

Lessons that Extend Beyond the Track

What happens in sports, argues Elias, can show students how gender, work breaks, and issues around pay permeate the lives of all professionals. “In theory, paying people for performance is a fair method,” she says. “But if you have to step out for caretaking, you don’t get paid. That’s the part I want people to grapple with.”

She also wants to show students how strong negotiators control information disclosure. Without access to the standard contracts common in team sports, individual athletes rely on sponsorship contracts, many of which mandate nondisclosure. But while risky, sharing and publicizing contract terms gives track and field athletes leverage. Understanding the interplay between information disclosure and each party’s sources of power is a crucial lesson in negotiation, says Elias.

“My goal for the case would be that a lot of people read it outside a gender topic class. And with sport being so popular and historically male dominated, this is the kind of case that can help people see how these issues play out as women’s sports increase in popularity.”

Professor Allison Elias is co-author of two cases, “Negotiating with Nike: Allyson Felix Encounters the ‘Kiss of Death’ (A)” and (B), with research assistant Rowena Kosher, published by Darden Business Publishing (March 2026).