Allyson Felix says she wants to return to competitive running with an eye on making a sixth Olympic team at the Los Angeles Games in 2028.
Felix laid out the plan — a pitch deck she calls Project Six — to her brother, Wes, before leaving the Cannes Lions festival in June, asking for about 20 minutes of his time to walk through it. She retired from track after the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 but told those close to her she has been thinking about running in Los Angeles for roughly a year.
The scale of what Felix is proposing is striking. She will be 42 in 2028; she already owns 11 Olympic medals, seven of them gold, and at Tokyo she won a relay gold and a bronze in the 400 meters. Felix says she has never had the chance to race in front of hometown fans, and that reality helped push her toward the comeback plan she is now calling Project Six.
Felix and her longtime coach, Bobby Kersee, plan to move to a full training schedule in October, with Felix expecting to return to certified competition sometime in 2027. She does not intend to resume regular international circuit duty in the run-up to the Olympic trials, a decision she said is driven by a desire to stay close to her children.
The outline Felix presented is both precise and constrained: a focused training block beginning this autumn, a phased return to certified meets next year, and a laser focus on peaking for the Los Angeles trials and, she hopes, the home Games themselves. Late in 2024 she and Wes co-founded Always Alpha, a sports-management agency dedicated to female athletes — a separate professional project she is balancing with the athletic plan.
Context matters here. Felix stepped away from elite competition after Tokyo in 2021. A comeback that concludes with an Olympic appearance on home soil would be an uncommon arc; no American sprinter has ever made the Games in their forties. She began entertaining the idea about a year ago while working out on a track near her home north of Los Angeles with her husband, Kenny Ferguson, and that daily proximity to the stadiums of LA28 has been part of the push.
The friction in Felix’s plan is immediate. She has publicly framed the return as a one-off homecoming rather than a full return to the grind of the global circuit, saying she plans not to compete regularly so she can be present for her family. Yet she is still committing to an intensive training schedule with Kersee and to certified competition in 2027 — a program that would demand high-level preparation and carry the physical risks of elite sprinting for an athlete who will be in her early forties.
There is another tension: Felix is running a business aimed at supporting female athletes while reviving an elite athletic career. Always Alpha was founded in late 2024 with Wes, and that work sits alongside the Project Six timetable she shared in June. Managing both roles will test the logistics and time Felix says she does not want to surrender.
The clearest next step is procedural: Felix and Kersee will begin the full training schedule in October, and Felix anticipates returning to certified competition in 2027. If those pieces fall into place, the real question will be performance — whether a sprinter who retired in 2021 and who plans a limited competition schedule can hit the standards and withstand the physical demands required to qualify for a sixth Olympic team in 2028.
Felix has framed the idea of running in Los Angeles as more than a sporting goal; she describes it as a once-in-a-lifetime homecoming that felt powerful enough to draw her back to the track. That is the choice she has made: to train again, to balance family and a growing business, and to test whether a sixth Olympic Games in her hometown is possible.
