That is the place of sport in our lives that we want to explore in Au féminin.
We love great performances, the moves that make us hold our breath, the victories we stand up to watch. We also want to look more closely at what surrounds them: a first class, a return put off for months, someone who helps you feel you belong. These quiet moments matter. For the woman experiencing them, they can change a great deal.
After having a baby, for instance, returning to sport can mean rearranging a whole routine. Finding someone to look after the child. Making an hour available. Getting to know a body that feels different. We will take time to tell these stories of returning, with their pleasures, their adjustments and the people who help make them possible.
Faith Kipyegon tells how she returned through walking and jogging after eight months of rest following the birth of her daughter. “It simply takes time”, she writes in her account published by World Athletics in 2020. There is something reassuring in those few words: even a champion needs time and people to turn to. Her story.
We will open the doors of studios and gyms, too. Before entering somewhere unfamiliar, you may want to know how you will be welcomed, whether beginners can join and what you need to bring. We will look for the details that make it easier to step inside. From Marrakech to Douala, Nairobi to Cape Town, we will explore these places and the women who bring them to life.
There will be room for fashion, and for the pleasure of taking a closer look. A colour that catches your eye. A print that brings something familiar to mind. The drape of a pair of trousers, a fabric, a shoe you can already picture with an outfit. We will show the pieces and explore the designers’ ideas, leaving each reader the pleasure of looking and choosing.
We will also talk about what supports us as we move: eating, sleeping, recovering and paying attention when tiredness lingers. In clear language, with useful ideas that make sense in our kitchens, our days and the resources available to us.
Africa and its diasporas will be at the heart of this magazine. We will seek out voices, ways of doing things and stories that are still too rarely seen. Women of different ages, with their ambitions, humour, sensitivity and their own ways of moving through life.
I hope that when you come here, you find a story to share with your sister, a place to send to a friend, a detail that stays with you. That you can linger over a photograph, learn something, recognise a part of yourself in a story.
And that, somewhere along the way, an idea begins to take shape: booking that class, trying that movement or taking out the trainers waiting by the door.
Quotation adapted from our French edition; original account published in English by World Athletics.
