The three-time Olympian from Cairo reached the last 16 in her event, beating a higher-ranked opponent while seven months pregnant. She beat American fencer Elizabeth Tartakovsky in the sabre competition before losing to South Korea's Hayoung Jeon in the quarter-finals on Monday.

Hafez, ranked 26th, said on her Instagram account that she was "three times an Olympian, but this time carrying a little Olympian!"

The 26-year-old Arab athlete wrote in English: "What appears to you as two players... in reality there were three! It was me, my competitor and my baby who has not yet arrived in our world".

She previously competed in the highly demanding sabre, a cutting weapon that requires lightning speed and reflexes from competitors, at Rio 2016 and the Tokyo 2020 Games, which were postponed to 2021 due to the pandemic.

Hafez said she was proud to have secured her place in the last 16 at the Grand Palais in Paris. "The rollercoaster ride of pregnancy is hard enough, but having to fight to keep the balance between life and sport has been nothing short of exhausting, but it has been worth it," she wrote.

Her Instagram post has garnered tens of thousands of "likes," with many comments praising the athlete, who also thanked her husband Ibrahim Ihab.

"Balancing pregnancy and pursuing your passion is never easy, so you should be very proud of yourself regardless of the outcome," one user said in the social media comments section.

"Amazing," added another. "But isn't it cheating to compete 2 against 1?" the user joked.

However, the athlete was also subjected to sexist comments from some users who suggested she should not have competed while pregnant, insinuating that this had affected her performance for her country.

"I first took up swimming and gymnastics, but then I had to leave gymnastics and joined fencing by chance. I felt like I wanted to try it after seeing my friend, and once I did, I loved it," she said in comments published by the International Fencing Federation.

Nada Hafez is something of an anomaly in Egypt. At the age of 25, she and her husband completed their medical degrees. The fencer specialised in clinical pathology, while her husband, a basketball player, became a thoracic cardiologist. 

Their professional parallelism is evidence of the egalitarian nature of their relationship, something that, for cultural reasons, is often not reflected in the general population of the Paris of North Africa.