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A Question of Performance

A Question of Performance

Exploring sport from every angle.

Ep 29. Helen Richardson-Walsh MBE – Journey to Gold

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Episode 29 is an interview with Helen Richardson-Walsh MBE. Over the course of her 17-year international Hockey career she amassed 19 medals including an Olympic bronze at London 2012, the European Championship title in 2015, World Cup bronze and Commonwealth silver, before finally reaching the pinnacle of her sport with an Olympic gold at the Rio Olympics 2016

We talk about how hockey has developed as a sport and what it’s like to play at an elite level. Helen also also talks openly about mental health in sport and her own battle with depression. For those of you wanting a bit more on the stories we both reference – I’ll pop some links below.

Hope you enjoy our chat.

More information / links to stories mentioned in this episode:

  • Rio Olympics 2016: GB women win first hockey gold on penalties – click here.
  • Helen Richardson-Walsh: GB hockey player talks about depression – click here.
  • Tammy Parlour on her own experience with anorexia and bulimia – click here.
  • Stories of other athletes and their challenges with mental health – click here.
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THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, WE CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

TX: 01.5.18 – Ep 29. Helen Richardson-Walsh MBE – Journey to Gold.

HOST: TAMMY PARLOUR

I:          Welcome to a Question of Performance.  I’m Tammy Parlour and in this series I’ll be talking with leading figures from sport and business about what improves, limits and drives performance.  Join me for 20 minutes of discussion twice a month to hear a range of views on what it means to be successful, how to cope with failure and what people have learnt along the way.  Today I’m talking with Helen Richardson-Walsh.  Over the course of her 17 year international hockey career she amassed 19 medals including an Olympic bronze at London 2012, the European Championship title in 2015, World Cup bronze and Commonwealth silver before finally reaching the pinnacle of her sport with an Olympic gold at the Rio Olympics in 2016.  We talk about what it’s like to play it at an elite level and how she’s seen hockey develop as a sport.  Helen’s also talked openly about the mental health of athletes and her own battles with depression.  For those of you wanting a bit more on the stories we both reference I’ll pop some links on the episode page of the website.  Hope you enjoy the chat.  Now I read somewhere that you have 293 international caps for England and GB, that’s quite a career.  Did I get that number right?

R:        Yes, I think so, around about.

I:          When you were at, I don’t know, number 127 or 206 or whatever it is, does it get to a point that it’s just normal?

R:        Do you know I don’t think for me it did because I was always someone who was kind of striving to be better and striving to win that elusive gold medal in whichever tournament it was.  So no putting on that shirt was always a special thing to do and I think particularly because quite early on in my career I had an ankle injury which kept me out of the game for two years and I needed three operations on that ankle and I was told by one surgeon that I would never play.  You can get back to a certain extent but you probably won’t be fit enough to play at the top level again.  So to hear those kind of words was difficult at the time but I got through it and then it made what I was doing even more special if it could be.  I didn’t take it for granted because I mean as athletes you know it can end at any point anyway.  But you don’t think it’s going to be you.  So when it nearly was me it made me really value I think a little bit more what I was a part of and yes the opportunities that I was being able to have.

I:          We’ll talk more about injuries and difficult times and so forth a little bit later.  Do you remember that first cap?

R:        Yes.  Against Japan at Milton Keynes.

I:          Did you win?

R:        In the lovely stadium, yes we won 3-1 and it was part of a training camp, so I think my first senior training camp for probably four or five days and part of that was a few matches against Japan.  Yes, so a very young 17 year old.

I:          What year was that?

R:        In 1999.  Yes a long time ago.

I:          For those who aren’t as knowledgeable about hockey can you talk a bit about the journey travelled for hockey as a sport?  In other words what it was like when you started and that first international cap and what the future looks like?

R:        Yes.

I:          Has it changed?

R:        Yes, oh dramatically.  I mean sport on the whole has changed incredibly.  I mean since I started way back then, as I already said, we had training camps so we would travel from all around the country wherever we lived to a training camp, either at Milton Keynes, which was the national stadium back then or Bisham Abbey or Lilleshall, one of those national sporting venues and we would come together for a week or a few days and then after that go back home.  It always felt like we were kind of two steps forward, one step back and that’s how it was and also in terms of the sport itself and going to the Olympic Games.  So Great Britain at the Olympic Games but in all of the other tournaments are the home nations.  So you go to the World Cup, the Europeans, all the other tournaments as England, Scotland, Wales and then we come together for one year before an Olympic Games and think we can try and compete with the rest that have been training for four years and it was a very difficult job.  Went to Sydney thought as a young 18 year old that we’d done everything that we could and in all honesty we were way off where we needed to be.

Fast forward what 12 years and then the London Olympics that was the real change.  So we failed to qualify for the Athens Olympics as a women’s team, funding cut by 70 per cent, London got the Olympics which saved our sport I think in this country, so we got some money back and for the first time we were able to start to train full-time.  As a women’s squad we were like yes we don’t want to waste this opportunity, home Olympic Games, we want to go there in the best shape possible.  So we now have a centralised programme which has its challenges.  It’s not the best for everybody and everything, it struggles with club hockey, it’s not perfect but in terms of the international team it took us from a team that was decidedly average to one that was not just competing at the very top but actually winning the Olympic gold.  We now train and have competitions and test matches out of Great Britain throughout that whole four year cycle as well.  So that’s a massive thing that’s changed since I started.  So yes I’m not involved anymore but feel like I’ve left it, well not me, but I’m leaving it in a better place than where I joined it.

I:          You’ve been at four Olympics.

R:        Yes.

I:          Bronze in London, gold in Rio.  How much of your performance do you put down to fitness, skill or psychology?

R:        I’ve never been asked that.  What was it, fitness, skill and psychology?

I:          Yes.

R:        Well I think once you get to the elite level for me the difference is what’s in your head.  So you clearly need to be at a certain standard but I certainly think that the psychology of sport is massively important.  Because I was always looking at the other teams, I was thinking why are the Dutch consistently good?  How do they manage to win time and time again and the Australians of old when I first got into the team that was then, they were the Dutch.  Because I guess their skills were very good, their understanding of the game was good.  But I didn’t feel like we weren’t as good or couldn’t be as good and so I didn’t understand why they were always winning and we weren’t able to and so that’s why I started my psychology degree actually, because I just thought it’s what going on in between your ears.  It’s how you control yourselves, how you make the situation the best for you and then obviously you’ve got all the tactical stuff is hugely important.  But yes so much of it for me is psychology.

I:          I want to talk a little bit about darker times, because you’ve spoken openly about your struggles with depression.  Do you think sport enabled there to be kind of a tipping point or was the [s.l. valance 00:08:36] or whatever you want to call it in you that was always going to sort of pop out at some point?

R:        Interesting question.  Do you know what?  I don’t know.  I have often wondered that myself like whether I would’ve struggled at a point in my life without that.  But sport has been so part of me since literally day one.  I can’t separate the two.  My identity as I was growing up was as a sports person, I played all sports not just hockey.  So yes I can’t separate those two.

I:          Why talk about it?

R:        It’s simple.  Because I think the majority of people, if not everybody, will struggle at some point in their life and if they don’t then I don’t know.  But if you’re pushing yourself, you’re challenging yourself, stretching yourself, taking yourself out of your comfort zone, it’s not going to be easy at times and certainly not everything is going to go your way.  We know the stats in terms of mental health that one in four at the moment will suffer with a mental health problem, so if you haven’t then you will know somebody who has and does and is.  So I just think the more people that can speak out about it and make it as part of life.

I:          Acceptance.

R:        Yes acceptance and awareness and then I think the more we can start to help one another.  I got to the point where I was really low in the deepest, darkest depths and didn’t necessarily need to go there and I think the more we talk about it, the more we’re open about it, the more that workplaces and schools really value this as a subject and the well-being of people in general hopefully means that people won’t get to that darkest place.  You know you can start to highlight it a bit earlier and start to do something about it before you get there.  So yes to raise awareness and if I can help one person.  I know a lot of people say that, but it’s true, if you can help one person feel a bit better about themselves then why not.

I:          We’ve spoken offline and I’ve mentioned my own struggles with mental health through the years.  I think at the core of why I talk about it is that it’s a way of reminding me that I am strong, reminding me that I can overcome.  Is that something you can relate to at all?

R:        Yes absolutely.  I was giving a talk actually last week for the Open University conference and it was about mental health in sport, which was great, and I used a thing that I’d seen recently online, it’s a Japanese philosophy, I think you pronounce it Kinsugi, I don’t even know, it’s about a guy broke his beloved bowl and he got it fixed, put back together with lacquer and gold and it was actually a more beautiful object for its broken bits and that’s how I try and think of it.  What happened to me is part of me and I’m not ashamed of it and yes you’re right I do get strength from remembering what I went through and that I got through it.  I do think sometimes it is so easy to … I sometimes look back and thing could I have dealt with it better?  But I try and remind myself of what it was like and you deal with every situation as best as you can and it’s not good or bad, it’s not better or worse, it’s just how it is.  So yes I do definitely take strength from that, yes.

I:          Do you think sport is becoming more mature in dealing with the mental health of athletes?

R:        Yes, I think certainly the Olympic sports and Paralympic sports definitely with the new government promise that they’re going to now look after the well-being of athletes, that’s going to be an important thing for them over the coming years.  I had available to me through the English Institute of Sport access to The Priory, which only came in in 2014.  So it was the perfect timing for me.  But having that access there was honestly, you know, I can’t say how helpful it was, it was incredible to have that support.  So yes I do think it is changing.  Obviously there’s been loads of stuff about duty of care of athletes and quite rightly and this whole thing about winning at all costs that UK sport have maybe portrayed and wanted.  I don’t know.  But I think if they get this right that whole thing of winning I think will improve anyway.  I think my experience of when I’ve been at my best and been able to thrive and been in teams that are thriving and really doing their best is when people are able to be themselves and really know who they are and value themselves.  That’s such a powerful thing.  So when we do really start to look after the well-being of not only the athletes but the coaches and the support staff and everybody, I think we will perform even better.  So it won’t be about not winning medals, I think we may even win even more if that’s possible, because we’re not too bad at the moment.  So yes I certainly think at that level it is and I know that rugby have obviously had big campaigns with Lift the Weight.  Yes I think sports are really getting on board.

I:          Have you achieved everything you wanted to with hockey?

R:        Do you know I got asked this question in a school recently and I started to give this long winded answer about medals and all this rubbish really and yes there’s a couple of medals that I would’ve wanted, but actually when I look back over my career the thing that I value the most isn’t the medal at the end.  People listening might be thinking it’s easy to say when you’ve got a medal at the end, so yes I take that, fair enough.  But even after the London Olympic Games when we hadn’t won the gold, we won the bronze, I was content with how I was.  Obviously I wanted to go on and try and get that gold but I was content in that moment and I’m content now and the thing that I’m most proud of is how we changed, how we went from that average team to a world beating team.

I:          Do you think you would’ve been as content if you’d got silver?

R:        In Rio or in London?

I:          Yes.  Because we often talk about the silver medal being the hardest.

R:        Yes I think so, yes I think so, because the processes that we went through is what I was proud of.  We changed everything and we were criticised for doing some of the stuff, for going centralised, not everybody agreed that we should do that.  But we knew we needed to do something different if we were going to get a different result.  But then the team that we built and the culture and being part of that London squad and then the Rio squad, both of those teams were different, they were unique, but at the core of them they had a real trust and respect and a connection that is difficult to describe and we created that.

I:          It must be heard to move beyond that.  Are you prepared for life beyond that?

R:        Yes, it is one of those really interesting things.  So I think I am at the point in my life where I am ready to move beyond that.  It is difficult sometimes to go on social media and you see the new team and all their hashtags that they’ve now got.  But it also makes me proud, so it’s difficult on the one hand, I’m not part of that anymore but it does make me proud that they’re continuing the stuff that we did together.

I:          Do you know what’s next for you or are you still trying to figure it out?

R:        Yes, I’m figuring it out.  At the moment saying yes to lots of stuff and doing different bits and pieces, but I’m starting a masters actually in September.

I:          Are you?

R:        Yes.

I:          What in?

R:        Organisational psychology.

I:          Fantastic.

R:       Yes and few different bits and pieces doing a bit of corporate speaking, speaking in schools.  But at the core of it all is I guess the stuff that I’ve spoken about a bit in that people being able to get the best out of themselves, getting strength from who they are, their value, their worth and well-being being a massive part of that.

I:          So what does success look like for you?  Just a small question.

R:        I think success it’s really corny isn’t it to say to be happy.

I:         Sometimes it’s the best response.

I:          What is happy?

R:        Happy is different to everybody.  Happy is not one thing.  For me it’s having that real inner … what is it … inner like peace of who you are and having a purpose, feeling …  This is a really bad answer.

I:          There’s not a bad answer.  It’s a difficult question.

R:        Yes.  I think yes, being happy, being content.  You often hear older people looking back on their lives and they don’t talk about the stuff they achieved necessarily, it’s about the connections that they made and the people that they met.  So success, I don’t know.

I:          To be continued.

R:        To be continued.

I:          We’re just going to end up with some quick fire questions for you.  What did you eat for breakfast?

R:        Porridge with blueberries.

I:          Favourite piece of kit.

R:        This is where my literal brain is like yes my training kit and then my other bit of my brain is going no say something different.

I:          Given I’ve never asked you the question before whatever you say to me will be fine.

R:        Do you know when you first said it the first thing that came to my head was my phone.

I:          Your phone.

R:        Yes, I know, terrible.

I:          Sporting hero.

R:        I’m going to say Sally Gunnell.

I:          Why?

R:        Because she was one of the first … so the ’92 Olympic Games was one of the first Olympics that I really remember.  I did a school project on it and Sally Gunnell obviously won the gold then and she was an inspiration.  But I’ve actually met her a couple of times since then as well and she did a Q&A at an event, an athletics event and she was even more of an inspiration having listened to her then, so yes Sally Gunnell.

I:          Best performance enhancer.  For me it would be sleep.

R:        That did come to mind, but I’ve played many matches without sleep and it didn’t really affect much.

I:          Gosh, you’re lucky.

R:        But then I’m just thinking about hockey, but actually in life, in normal life, now I’m living the normal life actually sleep does really if I don’t get it it’s not good.  So yes maybe I would say sleep as well now.

I:          Brilliant.  Well it’s been fantastic talking to you Helen, thank you very much.

R:        No worries.

I:          Thanks for listening.  You can follow the conversation on Twitter, Facebook and also don’t forget to subscribe online to a questionandperformance.com.

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Ep26. Tamsin Greenway – the playmaker on and off the court

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In episode 26 we talk with a netball superstar, Tamsin Greenway. As a former England international, a former England coach, a Sky Sports pundit and now Director of Wasps Netball, she has a unique insight into the whole sporting system.

We discuss the challenges and rewards of being an England player and then coach, how she is building Wasps Netball from the ground up, and the impact Sky Sports broadcasting is having on the sport. 

Tamsin Greenway is a former England international netball player, former England coach and now Director of Wasps Netball. Greenway guided Wasps Netball to the Vitality Netball Superleague title in the club’s inaugural season – her third consecutive title after back-to-back victories with Surrey Storm.

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THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT.  BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, WE CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

TX:  01.2.18 – Ep 26. Tamsin Greenway – the playmaker on and off the court

HOST:  TAMMY PARLOUR

T:      Welcome to a Question of Performance. I’m Tammy Parlour and in this series I’ll be talking with leading figures from sport and business about what improves, limits and drives performance. Join me for 20 minutes of discussion twice a month to hear a range of views and what it means to be successful, how to cope with failure and what people have learnt along the way.

TP: Today I’m talking with Tamsin Greenway. Now if you know anything about netball you’ll know who Tamsin is. She’s an absolute legend, a real superstar in the sport. I’ve met Tamsin on a few occasions now and I’m consistently struck by her drive. She has a genuine appetite to learn and to influence and a real ambition and determination to shape her sport. As a former England international, a former England coach, a Sky Sports pundit and now director of Wasps Netball, Tamsin also has a unique insight into the whole sporting system. We start the interview reflecting on her time on the court. I ask her has she always known she was good?

TG: Um, mm, yeah, no. I knew I was, I was always very sporty and netball was always my passion. At age ten I think I came home from my first ever session and got back to my mum and said, “I know what I’m gonna be now. I’m gonna be a netball player for England,” and she went, “Okay, we’ll see.” But it was kind of always something I wanted to do.

TP: What was it about that session?

TG: You know what? It’s bizarre because when I think back at it now and I always say to my mum, why the hell didn’t you put me into tennis or golf or something where I could have made some money or I could have retired rich. No, I love team sports so I played all sports anyway. First passion was football, ‘cause I was surrounded by boys. But I still remember that session. I remember the white board and us learning about the positions. I just loved being part of the team and I was a showy little goal attack that would shoot from anywhere. And I just, yeah, I guess I liked the whole social side of it as well and the fact that you could, yeah, you were playing with loads of other people. So I always knew netball was the way forward and I kind of got to an age at fifteen, sixteen where I knew I was probably better than others. I could hold the team together; I could make the team win. So yeah, I kind of knew I was there. I didn’t know whether I could make it all the way but I had a massive determination to give it a go.

TP: So much as changed in netball since you came onto the international stage, and I believe that was 2005.

TG: Yeah.

TP: From the kit to the audiences, Sky’s involvement. What change do you find most exciting?

TG: Just the engagement with youngsters I guess, just that passion. I came home and said I wanted for England. I had no idea what that meant or what it was or even if it was possible, whether it was a way of life. And I think now the players having the opportunity, the girls seeing that there’s a different way, and even not to the elite level, but just the whole club part, the social part, the fun element. I think there’s so much more talk about netball now. It used to be so isolated; it’s been so nice to bring lots of people into it from all different parts of life really, and I think that’s probably excited me the most that there’s so much interest in it now, and in women’s sport, that people talk about it a lot more.

TP: You said in an article that I read yesterday actually that after seven incredible seasons at Surrey… I’ll start this again. After seven incredible seasons at Surrey Storm, I feel now is the right time for me to take on a new challenge. I’m interested about what makes a right time. How do you know to stop something and go onto something else?

TG: I probably got quite stale with certain things. I’d done things for such a long time, I could go to Surrey Storm with my eyes closed, you know. I’d played there, I’d coached there, I knew the ins and outs of everything and I didn’t think I could take it any further. You know, we made five grand finals in seven seasons, we’d won back to back titles and I couldn’t push it any more. Like there was nothing more to give I guess and that’s I think for me, and I know that as a person that I’m very, once I get to that stage I know that I need to go and do something else and find something else to do, which it has its pros and cons I guess. But yeah, I felt I couldn’t give any more to it than I’d already given and it was fresh for someone else to take on.

TP: Well I’m particularly interested in your current challenge. You’re director of Wasps. What does that involve?

TG: Everything. When I first joined it was mad because Wasps took it on, who have been absolutely fantastic, but they knew very limited about netball. So I mean I was getting asked questions at the start about how sprung the court needed to be and the dimensions and stuff. That’s what Google’s for, guys. But yeah, it’s kind of moulded into coach, overseeing all the community programmes, overseeing all the junior academies, and then being a sounding board for everything else. We’re great ‘cause we have a PR team, we have a ticketing team, we have all the guys there that are very involved and love it, but yeah more sort of advice of what netball looks like and how it should move forward.

TP: Talk about the court, you have literally built this from the ground up. Daunting or just absolutely invigorating?

TG: I guess looking back at it, it was probably quite daunting. I remember taking it on thinking this is brilliant, it’s my dream job. I walked into a boardroom full of lots of important people and they sold me the dream and I did not play it cool. I put my head on the table and went, “This is my dream job, okay, I’m here.” Walked into it and then thought, oh God, we don’t have anything. We didn’t have anything. We didn’t have a team, we didn’t have the back room staff, we didn’t have anything. So kind of the enormity hit home about a month after taking on the gig. But it kind of all just fell into place. It was one big roller coaster really. Like I don’t think I’d have changed it. I’ve almost found this season harder because last season you were just thrown into it, dropped in at the deep end and it was like right, sink or swim. This season has probably been more difficult because I’ve actually now got to plan things and last year it was just get on there, get a team together, try and win, which we ended up doing which doesn’t happen very often.

TP: But now I imagine you feel like you need to win again and again and each time get that little bit…

TG: I was having this conversation about coaching the other day actually, because I don’t… the pressure never stops, it never changes. So we won and the grand final was amazing for about three hours afterwards, and we had a great night out. And the next morning I’m going, okay, what does the team look like next year. Who’s gonna sign other players? What are the other teams gonna look like? How are we gonna win it again? And I kind of get annoyed at myself for having that part of me because it would be really nice sometimes just to sit back and go, wow, look what we did, and instead it was, right, how are we gonna build, what next.

TP: You’re in charge of player recruitment. When you’re trying to build a team, what ingredients do you look for?

TG: It has to be the right mix, so that’s not only the performance side. The performance side to me is the easy bit. I’ve got a style of play, how I want to play netball, so I have an idea of the shooter, the goal attack, what they kind of mix, and that’s easy for me to spot. The culture side is probably the most important part of anything. A winning team has the best team environment and different mixes of personalities and people can really disrupt that quite quickly. So I’m all about what they’re gonna bring to the team as a person. And actually if you know my team we’re all kind of odd bods in a weird way, but they’ve all got the same sort of general outlook, morals, that kind of thing and that makes a huge difference especially when you’re under pressure.

TP: To be the best team though, you have to get the best out of all your people. Any tips?

TG: Honesty, and that’s probably the biggest thing that I’ve had from being a player and being coached by lots of different people. They’re the most difficult conversations to have and it’s probably the hardest thing that I found becoming a coach, that those chats are awful to have sometimes, but you’re talking to grown ups who, you know, who want to achieve and want to do something and actually there’s no point fobbing them off. So how honest you can be with people at the start from everything from how much they’re gonna play to what they’re bringing or even if it’s just difficult conversations about what’s going on in life, it’s really important that you can have those chats with people. They don’t always like what you say and they sometimes don’t always hear what you’re saying, but at least you give it a go.

TP: Do you think having been an athlete and then a coach gives you that edge?

TG: I think it’s given me a style of how I want to have my team. It wouldn’t work for everybody and that’s what I say about the culture’s really important, ‘cause actually that way is not the best way for everyone. I’ve had lots of coaches that their way to fire you up is to shout at you, to basically tell you you’re rubbish when you want to be better. I’ve also had coaches that have told you brilliant. Each way is different for people, but I think it’s at least given me an angle that I’ve gone, right, this is how I want to coach the players, and everyone can buy into that.

TP: You now, in your role now as a Director of Wasps, do you look back on that younger self, that athlete or that coach, and think what I was thinking then, you know, I had no clue. Or have you just…?

TG: Yeah, I was a terrible coach when I first started I think.

TP: Really?

TG: Oh God, I think back to that first year…

TP: What constitutes a terrible coach?

TG: Well, two parts of it. So the first part would be the performance side. We made the grand final that first year and I had a good team and we were probably favourites to win, and at half time we were level and we weren’t playing well, and I came in and just tore strips off everybody. I just shouted, ‘cause I was on court, I was angry and angst, and I wanted to do. I remember the team talk; there was not one bit of constructive tactical technical bit. It was basically played better and we went out and we went goal for goal for the whole goal and we lost in the last 30 seconds, and I was devastated. And I look back at it now and go, that was just awful. I didn’t know how to control my emotions. And player management side as well, there wasn’t that honesty there so there were players in there that perhaps, you know, that thought maybe they were gonna be playing and I hadn’t had that conversation ‘cause I just presumed they knew weren’t at that time. So it was a massive learning curve.

TP: You say you didn’t know how to control your emotions. How did you learn that? Was it just a case of realising what had happened and then just sort of saying, okay, I’ve just got to sort myself out?

TG: That took time and that was growing up. Having my daughter helped a lot. I remember the first final I lost having Jamie and she was handed to me straight after the game and it changed everything. It was, you know, I haven’t got three days to mope around and be upset about this ‘cause this little thing wants to play with the confetti on the court that was shot over the other team, you know, it’s that simple. I grew up and you learn to control your emotions. I don’t think you can change your younger self; I think you just grow into what you want to be. You can look back at it now and some of the things I did were stupid, and actually as a player on court I’m a bit Marmite because I’ve had those emotions, but I don’t think I would have been as good or been in as many successful teams or won as much stuff if I hadn’t been like that. So I don’t regret any of that stuff but I think now I can look at it a lot more open and not be as fussed as I was back then.

TP: We’ll talk about the challenges. What’s something you’re most proud of?

TG: I think the year I won the super league just as a coach, not as a player coach, that’s probably the proudest moment.

TP: And why was that bigger than being a player coach?

TG: Because on court I can influence, because I can still do, I can still be out there, I can still make a difference court. I think to actually not be there and still give over the same passion and the instruction and still actually have done it without having to have played. Not that I was, you know, I’m not saying I was the best player on the court ever and definitely wasn’t in this final by a country mile, but you can change a lot more on the court than off the court. You have to say the right things and be the right person so I was proudest of that.

TP: Much of women’s sport is going through a massive transformation at the moment. Part of the challenges about trying to understand how to communicate the value to the external world and sports and teams are trying to engage larger audiences and find sponsors and build partnerships. Are those challenges familiar to you too?

TG: Yeah, definitely. I think all the sports are going through the same transition and it’s great we’re getting more and more coverage and people are talking about it more, but I’ve kind of found that’s been going on for a quite a few years now and we’ve come to a halt again about how we actually start to engage and big things for me have been looking at how it’s very different to how probably men watch male sports. And, yeah, the big thing with netball is how we’re getting more people to come to the games and watch and some of us being a mother as well how we’re getting women to not feel guilty about doing that or give time and have time with their families to come along to games and actually do something that they enjoy as well. Yeah, I think there’s lots of different angles on it at the moment and I’m trying to explore different ways, because I think in netball we’ve got to a point where we’ve got a great audience but we now need to move it forward again, and I think we’re all sort of at that same point, well how do we do that.

TP: Move it forward as increase it that little bit more?

TG: Yeah, definitely. I think the participation’s always there. I don’t think that’s the issue. Women are playing sport, you know. Kids are getting access at school. Yes, we’d like to do more and we’d like to have more clubs and more stuff going on, I know all that. But the biggest thing for me is this transition from the participation to the elite; how are we getting women to watch sport. What are they interested in? What do they like doing? And, yeah, how do I get regular… If I didn’t have any access to netball as a kid in terms of watching it, I knew my club and that’s all I ever saw. If you’d had seen the elite game, how incredible that would have been. So it’s now trying to make that transition and go hang on, there’s some great sports happening all the time, there’s some great role models, come along and see it, you know, come along and do something different for the day and see if you enjoy it.

TP: I remember watching my first elite netball match and that was probably about five years ago. I grew up in America and netball wasn’t there at all, it was just not part of my experience at all, and I saw the first elite game on the TV, England v Jamaica I think it was, oh God, it was amazing. The athleticism, I was just absolutely captivated. How important has Sky’s involvement been do you think to the growth of netball?

TG: Huge. You can’t take that away. They’ve put it into the forefront, they’ve made people aware of it, they’ve jazzed up the game, they’ve shown it as an actual technical sport as well. I know when I do the analysis on Sky and we do the Sky Pads, the amount of feedback we get from that, people are like we’ve never had that input, we’ve never seen that part of it before and it was taken seriously. And I do quite a bit of work with Sky and actually, you know, Sky do so much for our sport and actually we’ve now got to stop necessarily going, oh the media don’t show enough. Yes of course we’d like more stuff, but Sky are doing a fantastic job. What I want to say now is actually let’s support that, let’s watch the games, let’s go online and see the clips and the highlights and see the analysis and actually give back to it and start supporting women supporting women, because I do genuinely think that the media have been a game changer for us and actually now we need to start repaying the favour if we want it to keep growing and growing and growing.

TP: Do you have a sense of how to tackle this challenge?

TG: I wish. No, I think culturally we are always gonna struggle ‘cause we’re different. I spent a lot of time in Australia and actually some of the stuff that doesn’t necessarily transfer just because culturally we’re very, very different, and I don’t always think that’s the answer. I think there are different ways of doing it. I’m still not sure we’re getting the message out to everybody and I’d like to see that. So for example, we’ll have schools come and watch. So a school will bring fifty kids to come and watch a game of netball and they absolutely love it, and they go home. What I want to see then is parent go, oh you really enjoyed that, cool, I’ll take you again another week. And I know what it’s like, I’m busy as a parent and there’s other things going on, so it’s how we try to change that and make sure they’re getting the message and actually starting to do something, whether it’s hockey, football, rugby, cricket, netball, whatever it is the sport they’re involved in, that you can have more impact. And, you know, that’s something that I hope I’ll be able to transfer to my daughter as well. But sport’s always been my passion so it’s now trying to find that way to engage other people that perhaps haven’t got into it or haven’t necessarily thought that that’s the mum-daughter thing that they’re gonna do. So I think there’s different messages to get out there and that’s something I’m trying to look into.

TP: You’re part of the Wasps family. Is that important to be part of or has that been significant being part of a bigger grouping? How does that…?

TG: Definitely. The brand has helped hugely, just by having a name and a sort of professional element to it, and that’s behind the scenes and then when you’re talking fan base. And I think it’s the future. I think it’s the way that sports are gonna go cross across into many different areas and angles, whatever that works, whether it’s a football team, a rugby team, a cricket team. I think that works for us as well because when you get an affiliation to a club over here, whether it be football or rugby or cricket, it does cross over, and the amount of interest we’ve had from men that bring their sons to the rugby game or come with their family that’s gone, oh my wife plays netball or my daughter’s just started at school, oh maybe we’ll come to a game as well. We’ve had so much of that. And the brand helps because it does, you know, having people like JLR on board, we wouldn’t have necessarily got our foot in the door if it hadn’t been for Wasps.

TP: What’s the biggest thing you’d like to see change over the next, I don’t know, five years around netball?

TG: I’d love the league to become semi-pro, you know, that’s a massive thing. It’s moving in that direction. We’ve got England players that are full time but that gap now between the England players and that layer underneath is still big, so I’d love there to be 150 to 200 women in this country that are semi-pro athletes for netball. How amazing would that be that they can still build a career but they can actually train properly and play properly?

TP: And what needs to happen to enable that?

TG: Like anything, increase in numbers and attendances at games, bigger sponsorship and more coverage, but they all, it’s like chicken egg, you know, what happens first. So we get the spectators in, the coverage will then come.

TP: You’ve been an elite athlete, which is very much focusing on the self, and then a coach focusing on the athletes and now director of Wasps Netball focusing on the team and the bigger sports. What’s next? NGB? Does Jo Adams need to watch her back?

TG: No, not yet. The business is not my forte. You know what? I constantly think like that. You know, I won’t coach for ever. The sport is more important to me than being involved in one thing. I love what I do at the moment and I’ll always be involved in netball. I want to help the sport. It’s always what I’ve been passionate about from day one and I’m not prepared to give up on it. So whatever that angle takes, you know, whatever pathway I go down next it’ll be to help, encourage the sport and to do what we’ve talked about, because I genuinely think it’s still a blank page and for most women’s sports I think they’re just at that edge where we could take it forward and it’s just about finding the right spark.

TP: It’s an exciting time.

TG: Yes.

TP: This pod cast is about performance, it’s about different people’s views on what success is. I mean you’ve touched on that throughout the whole conversation, but I just want to ask you more directly. What’s success for you personally?

TG: I think there’s always a goal, so the goal each year for success is to win or to achieve this target or that target. But I think, and especially this year, I took a bigger step back from that for success. You can’t win every single year. You can’t keep winning. It’s not what it works. So what is it? And I think the answer for me was the journey. Yes, we had a goal, we wanted to get there, but from this year I learnt that there were many different ways to go and wind, and actually some of those ways were really good fun. Some of them were awful, not gonna like, some of them were awful. But I think success for me now is much bigger than that ultimate end goal. It’s about the journey and what you’re on and that’s kind of how I feel. So everything, there isn’t ever an end goal because if you didn’t win this year there’s always something to do next year and there were always some other bits that I collected on the way that made it a bigger purpose, and that’s kind of how I feel about it. Not always after the grand final when I’ve lost, but I’m trying to see success now as a much bigger picture.

TP: I’m just gonna end up with some quick fire questions. What did you eat for breakfast?

TG: An apple. How boring is that?

TP: Sounds [unclear 00:20:44]. Favourite piece of kit.

TG: Favourite piece of kit, like playing kit?

TP: Any kit you want, however you want to define that.

TG: Favourite piece of kit is my first England dress.

TP: Sporting hero.

TG: Ooh, Roger Federer.

TP: Why?

TG: Because I think the way he’s evolved as a player I think is absolutely incredible, and look at him still going now.

TP: Most useless piece of advice you’ve been given or given to somebody else.

TG: That I need to be taller.

TP: Need to be taller.

TG: To play goal attack. Can you believe that I was given feedback on that? You need to be taller.

TP: Okay. Greatest passion outside of sport.

TG: Oh God. Oh, that’s really sad. Do I have one? Greatest passion outside of sport. You know what? It’s just family time, like hanging out with my daughter, like whatever she’s into, being passionate about that, which is princesses at the moment and unicorns.

TP: How lovely. Look at you. Best performance enhancer.

TG: Best performance enhancer. You know what? Sleep. Getting enough time to actually be able to train and do everything properly.

TP: Well it’s been brilliant talking to you, Tamsin, thank you very much.

TG: Thank you.

TP: Thanks for listening. You can follow the conversation on Twitter, Facebook and also don’t forget to subscribe online to aquestionofperformance.com

[End]
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Ep 19. Katie Richards – performance scientist on enabling children to develop as elite athletes

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How can we support children to develop into elite athletes? In episode 19 we chat to Performance and Coaching Scientist, Katie Richards. We discuss the explosion in success of British Gymnastics, the issues facing young elite performers and how a supportive coaching framework can enable talented children to develop.

Katie Richards is a Chartered Scientist, BASES Sport & Exercise Scientist, Senior Lecturer Sport Psychology at St Mary’s University and is completing her PhD in the skill acquisition strategies utilised by high-performance coaches, and their psychological impacts.

She has worked in a range of sports including gymnastics, mixed martial arts, pistol shooting, synchronised swimming, golf & Paralympic sitting volleyball. She is most active within the discipline of women’s artistic gymnastics and was National Squad Coach in Aerobic Gymnastics 2007-2010. Currently she concentrates the majority of her time towards developing young performers (5-10 years) towards the elite performance pathway.

Visit Katie’s website here.

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THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT.  BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, WE CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

TX:  01.7.17 – Ep 19. Katie Richards – performance scientist on enabling children to develop as elite athletes.

HOST:  TAMMY PARLOUR

TP: Welcome to A Question of Performance. I’m Tammy Parlour and in this series I’ll be talking with leading figures from sport and business about what improves, limits and drives performance. Join me for 20 minutes of discussion twice a month to hear a range of views on what it means to be successful, how to cope with failure and what people have learnt along the way.

[Music]

TP: Today I’m talking with senior lecturer in sports psychology at St. Mary’s University, Katie Richards. Katie’s an ex-international gymnast who went on to become national squad coach. She continues to work with athletes across many different sports on their performance. This is what she’ll refer to in the interview when she talks about being a practitioner. What I particularly find interesting when talking to Katie is her insight into how coaching and how a supportive framework can enable young athletes to develop as performers. I first asked her though to talk about her continued involvement with gymnastics.

KR: I work mainly within the discipline of women’s artistic gymnastics, as a coach, a coach mentor, tutor. I sit currently on the the technical committee as one of the coach education reps and I also work for a local gymnastics club as their coach development officer. So I’m still involved quite quite a lot, yes, in gymnastics.

TP: As a former gymnast, what’s your opinion on the explosion and success in gymnastics and the the growing participation rates?

KR: It’s so exciting and it’s so great, you know it’s a really great time to be part of British gymnastics and you now how successful it has been. It’s gonna be down to a number of things. So, first of all, we have much more support now for gymnast and that support ranges from facilities, you know the amount of funding for facilities. We’ve also got the fact that we have been training and supporting our coaches more and putting more into that, so that the coaches are better equipped in terms of knowledge. They have the ability to actually access sport science and have contributed coming in with different expertise to support the coach in their process. And I think we, we now just see gymnastics in society for the difficult sport that it is and we give it the respect that it actually requires now. Whereas, before when it maybe wasn’t geting as much publicity, it it maybe just kind of wasn’t, wasn’t seen or thought about in the same way. So I definitely think we’ve got this combination of funding, coach education. We’ve got the fact that now gymnasts are making careers from gymnastics. So they’re they’re moving into this almost professional status of gymnastics. But they’re then going out and we’re retaining them, we’ve got people now like [unclear] set up their own gymnastics programme for children and for low level participation. So we’re retaining them in a way that they are becoming public figures. We see them on celebrity shows, so it, it it’s got more of a career path within it now and really it’s down to how creative they want to be within it. So I think the support from all angles and the structure of British gymnastics has really helped that, but it’s been a long journey; the development of the competitive programme to give structure to gymnasts and coaches has really now shown that we’ve been developing these gymnasts from the age of six or seven, now we’re seeing them at 19, 20; over the last kind of 13 years they’ve spent developing in our structure and it just really shows that making changes at the lower level, the younger level will eventually make the change at the senior level…it’s a very long winded answer.

TP: Sounds like it’s been a very deliberate process that gymnastics has has gone through. How do you grow an Amy Tinkler or Max Whitlock?

KR: Well, I definitely think it has to start young. Gymnastics is an early specialisation sport and although it’s very important that they have skills in different areas, like rowing and catching etc. ultimately there there needs to be a lot of specialisation quite early. I think can we grow them I think is is…Everybody has their own story; I mean you mentioned Amy Tinkler and Max Whitlock they both got very different stories so I wouldn’t say that there is one, one recipe or one method to do it but you’ve got the fact that they do need that support structure in terms of things like location of the gym club that they are training at in relation to where they live, so that, so that gymnastics can fit into their life. Making choices they have to make choices and sometimes those choices are going to be made by maybe parents and coaches quite early on about how much time they spend training, working with the schools to negotiate how they can continue with their studies and study effectively, but maybe not have to be there for as long as the school day is and whether there are alternatives for how they do that and making sure that the coaching structure is there. So it has to be collaboration, it’s not just one person behind any fantastic gymnast, like the ones you’ve just mentioned there. It’s it’s a team really, and I think just probably not losing sight of the fact that that is a little person to start with. They are a human and they are a person and they need to be part of the process and we need to keep perspective that we’re developing a person there as well as just trying to create a gymnast. If you listen to Amy Tinkler and Max Whitlock in their interviews, you know, they are very well-rounded human beings and that’s all credit to the team that’s been behind them but they haven’t lost sight of the fact that you’re working with a person and so it just maintains perspective. There’s gonna be times where the perspective is on their gymnastics and the emphasis is on their performance, but there’ll also be times where the the emphasis is on them as a person and developing them. So I think it’s about having a support team, having the logistics all set out and and maintaining perspective I think.

TP: You talked about some of the practical issues that are probably different with young elite athletes. Are young people a different breed or are the issues being dealt with standard at any age?

KR: I mean yes. They have very different constraints on them, we all have constraints and barriers but people under the age of 18 have very different ones. One of those things is choice. Up until kind of 16, 17, 18 they don’t get the option of always making choices. They are obliged and constrained to do certain things such as schooling, and such as exams and qualifications. You know they’re living with parents, there will be rules in the house about particular things, so they don’t get a lot of autonomy in the choices and decisions sometimes, which can be frustrating. We we know that we look at society, you know young people are becoming more aware of the fact that they want to start making decisions about their life and I feel that is happening earlier and that could be because we are encouraging that in school and society for children to take more responsibility for themselves and the choices that they make. But there are still constrains to be children and we are still responsible for them so I think we…it would be naïve to suggest that they are not any different to us and we have to remember that they are children still and there is a lot of development that still has to happen from a physical and cognitive and and social perspective and sometimes when we are specialising people such as in gymnastics, we can often forget, I don’t want to use the word neglect because that could suggest that it’s it’s a conscious decision but we might forget that we need to be developing them socially as well. Whereas maybe when you’re working with adults that socialisation has probably already occurred. So there are certain things that we just need to pay more attention to and I think that’s where I mentioned about perspective; that ok, we are trying to create a champion or a high level performer here. We also need to be aware of their other needs as a human being as well.

TP: How …how do parents fit into this whole thing?

KR: Parents are such a valuable tool. Depending on who you speak to and sometimes they can come across as being potentially a barrier in a gymnast’s performance. But actually if you embrace parents and you embrace them in the process and you engage them and you you communicate with them and explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and what your long term vision is for their child because that’s the thing; in the end parents just want the best for their children and they don’t intentionally want to cause stress a lot of the time it’s unintentional. In my experience, a lot of the time it’s just misunderstood, so they will be branded a pushy parent when actually they just, they just want to know what’s going on because that parent is trying to manage maybe not only that one child, maybe they have more than one children, more than one child, and they’re trying to manage their children and they are overseeing everything [unclear] school, they’re overseeing gymnastics, they’re overseeing other activities as well, sometimes they can come across as pushy. And don’t get me wrong, there are parents out there who unfortunately, are maybe making sport too serious and trying to push their children in ways that aren’t helpful but in my experience when you engage parents in the process you explain the long term vision, you, you talk to them about how important they are that you’re really kind of specific in the areas that they should be supporting the child, the gymnast in I think that usually works very well with them. Parents need to be giving emotional support. They need to be giving you know that kind of tangible support , in terms of get them to training, or or get somebody to get them to training. Make sure they’ve got the right equipment and unconditional regard, so regardless of how they do, they need to be there for them. Gymnast don’t, after a long 3, 4 hour training session, they don’t want to then have to de-brief in the car for the next 20 minutes about what they did on each piece of apparatus and how they did and how they did in comparison to somebody else. They want to talk about other things or they just want to you know have a short conversation: “how was gym?” “yeah, it was alright today.” “Oh great”, you know “what what what was good about it?” “Oh, you now, I just got through my programme and I seemed to be making progress.” “That’s fantastic to hear. Well done. What do you want for dinner?” as opposed to this long drawn-out conversation and I know why parents do it, a lot of the times…because of the way gymnast set up for training, parents can’t watch because there aren’t viewing galleries, that’s not what they are built for, they are built for gymnastic training, so parents can sometimes grasping in the dark and so they’re grasping for communication and they do that through the gymnast. But we’ve got to remember that the gymnast is a child so they actually may not be able to communicate all the messages across which is why it’s just so important that coaches can set up some way of giving regular feedback. It doesn’t have to be formal, but some kind of regular feedback for parents.

TP: You’ve worked not just in gymnastics; you’ve worked across a number of other sports as well. Are elite athletes a different breed to the general population?

KR: Yes, definitely [laughter].

TP: How so?

KR: And again, everybody’s opinion is going to differ but I think there are so many different skills that are developed, so many areas of a person that are developed and [unclear] with elite athletes at quite a young age. To become an elite…and I now obviously we have the demographics that start training later in life and transition into elite later but for the majority of elite athletes they’re starting to train when they are a child and they’re being exposed to situations, events and decisions that a lot of adults don’t get exposed to maybe at all in their life or if not, not much later in life. So making decisions and making making difficult decisions and having to make choices and and some people might call them sacrifices but missing an event because you’ve got to train. That that is a kind of decision that for most children growing up they’ll have commitments but it won’t be as as strong a commitment as maybe committing to becoming an elite athlete so they they may not have the same issue of having to say “Do you know what, I can’t go to that party on Friday night because I’ve got to go training on Friday or Saturday morning”. So they’re having to make decisions and understand about decisions and decision-making quite early on in their career. They might also experience some level of what we might call trauma, so you now they experience injury that that set them back or take them out of training or competition for a number of weeks sometimes months. That we might actually describe that as as as trauma in sports and they’re having to then deal with feeling of maybe being able to progress which could be quite frustrating. They might feel that they’re not as connected to their training group and their relationships might suffer and and then then just everything that comes with being an elite athlete the the the fact that you’ve committed to something, it’s your goal but with that means that you are going to have to commit, you are going to have to make sacrifices, you are going to have to push yourself. This isn’t something that you’re obliged to do maybe like your school exams. This is something that you’ve chosen. But from that comes lots of opportunity, great times and personal success and achievement so I think it develops the person much earlier and I think again if they’re supported properly they learn to deal with setbacks much better. They become more confident. They might be better at leading, making decisions, taking a step back when they need to. You know, when the coach is like “Actually, I’m the coach, so we’re gonna do this and this” and being able to accept that. You know there are just so many different things that sports does and I know that as a practitioner. I often talk to coaches and parents and athletes about the fact that this decision you’re having to make or this amount of stress if you like that that you’re deal with right now…there are some people that will go through their life that will never have to experience this. Children that have just finished their GCSEs, and you’ve got…while those GCSEs are going on I know that there are people out there training for European and world championships whilst still trying to do their GCSEs, whilst still trying to get exceptional results in them and that’s a real challenge because there has to be that high level of motivation, that determination, that discipline; the emotional control that is required and then making sure that they’re making the right choices for their body to kind of heal it properly and recover properly. So I think it really does develops the person much more.

TP: I just want to take a moment to ask you about yourself. Your own practice, your own coaching. What stresses you out most? What pulls your motivation down and how do you cope with that?

KR: So I guess I can reflect as a coach and practitioner. What gets my motivation down is when…it’s not that when someone isn’t making progress because ultimately they will progress at the pace that they’re meant to progress at. But it’s often quite when you see someone that is quite frustrated because they’re not progressing. You start to ask yourself, have I done everything that I possibly can here? Have I ticked all the boxes? Is there something that I’m missing? Is there something that I’m not doing? So, when you’re working in a role such as mine coaching, as a practitioner as a consultant, when somebody is unhappy with their progress, you really kind of take that on and you start to think “is it me? “is it something that I’m doing?” “Could I be doing more for you?” And there will be people that will say you can’t take that all on your burden and of course you can’t, you must be rational but because the role is in itself a helping role you..one of the great things about the role is it’s fantastic to see people develop and that’s not necessarily developing their performance but develop as a person. When you’re faced with somebody who’s unhappy, I think that’s the thing that maybe gets me down but I wouldn’t say it gets my motivation down, it just gets me down and makes me kind of question, you know, if I’m doing everything that I can. In terms of my motivation, it’s when I’ve got too much going on [laughter]. When when you take on too much. Which is, which is…

TP: Do you do that regularly?

KR: Oh yes, yes definitely and most people that know me will be nodding and laughing now. I think it’s because it’s such a reactive role, especially as a as a practitioner. You could take on a client and then you could only hear from them once every couple of months and then suddenly they wanna speak to you every couple of weeks and then you’re trying to be quite reactive and balance your workload. You just can’t predict what’s going to happen, you know sports is an unpredictable beast. So I think it the… trying to stay on top of things and still be effective and that’s when I think my motivation decreases when I feel that I’m not being effective and I’ve got a lot going on but all it takes is a swift word with myself and a…a…a couple of hours or a day to write the list, get back on track with things and and and then you kind of get that…that…that energy again to get out and do what you do, but yeah it’s managing workload in a role such as a mine is a difficult one and I’m sure that there are lots of people out there that would agree.

TP: So everybody that I’m talking to I’m asking them to talk about what success or what performance is to them personally. How do you define success for yourself?

KR: [laughter] I mean I laugh because it’s one of my favourite topics to talk about with people, is what is success and from doing that it’s made me reflect a lot on what is success to me. It’s definitely changed Tammy over over the years. If you asked me when I was 19, 20, 21 what success was it would be winning hands down and I can remember how that was to win really drove me to train hard and put in a lot of effort and make difficult choices. You know I was at university and training and they gym I was training was an hour away and I used to do that 6 days a week whilst still doing my undergraduate degree. I…I did not go to a lot of the nights out etc. because I was training, but that was okay because I had a reason for it. I knew that if I wanted to win or come as close to winning as I could that I would have to…I would have to make those choices. I would have to put in effort. The fact that I then made those choices, if I didn’t train hard then I’d be really angry with myself because it would be like well what was the point then. Why are you going to make that choice, go, miss out on something and then not make it worthwhile and so it gave me motivation. It did make me quite hard on myself. You know it did, it did put a lot of pressure on things and when things weren’t going well it would make me frustrated but I had a fantastic coach who is now a very good friend of mine and she was….she was very interested in psychology and she was very level-headed and she kept perspective and she knew what I wanted to achieve and she wanted to achieve it for me as much as I did. But she was very good at keeping me grounded and and preparing me psychologically and giving me that emotional control and support that I needed.

TP: So that was you then, what about you now?

KR: So now, I’m completely different I think, in terms of now for me success is measured in such a different way in what I do now so if…if…if an athlete that I work with wins I can’t take that as a success for me because I…I appreciate that there are so many things that make that win ultimately the person, the gymnast themselves and it’s part of being a team. So I think success for me is about feeling effective in that if I feel that I’m doing what I can and I feel that my clients…I can see more elements of progression be that as a person or in their performance, I think that is success to me. And if people are happy, people interact with me and they feel better for that…in comparison to when they started that is success and I think that if anybody ever describes me as inspirational that to me is is success. I want to be somebody that…just like I’ve done there when I reminisced about my coachI want to leave an impact on people, a positive impact so that they can say “Do you know what? That person helped me or that person inspired me”, and and that to me is success.

TP: Just gonna end up with some quick fire questions.

KR: Okay.

TP: What did you eat for breakfast?

KR: A protein yoghurt.

TP: Favourite piece of kit?

KR: My [unclear]

TP: Sporting hero?

KR: Anthony Joshua.

TP: Why?

KR: Because I like how humble he’s been and he comes from a place…he comes from humble beginnings and he’s remained humble throughout and that’s not to say that he’s worked harder than anyone else but I think he pays tribute to the fact that he’s had a team that got him there and and he feels part of the team and I think it’s that perspective and it’s that level of humility that he has and how humble he is is nice to see.

TP: Most useless piece of advice you’ve been given or given to somebody else?

KR: So I remember when I was about 24 somebody told me to not be so passionate.

TP: Right.

KR: And I’m so pleased that I ignored them.

TP: Sounds like good advice to ignore them.

KR: Yeah [laughter].

TP: Greatest passion outside of sport.

KR: Ooh, spending time with family and friends. Definitely.

TP: And last one, best performance enhancer.

KR: Oooh, okay. So I’m gonna sound like a right geek now but being mindful. Being able to be in the moment is my best performance enhancer.

TP: Brilliant. Thank you very much Katie, it’s been fantastic talking to you.

KR: Thank you very much.

[music]

TP: Thanks for listening. You can follow the conversation on Twitter, Facebook and also don’t forget to subscribe online to a question of performance.com

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Ep 15. Kelly Smith MBE – football legend on commitment, retirement and love of the game

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In episode 15 we talk with Kelly Smith about her football career, how the sport has changed over the past twenty years and her views on success. We also talk about what it’s like being in the public eye and how it feels to embark on a new career as a coach.  

Kelly Smith, arguably England’s greatest ever female player, dedicated her whole life to playing football and retired from international duty after 20 years. Kelly was the first England Women’s superstar, on the global stage. One of Smith’s greatest strengths was her longevity, defying lengthy injuries and her age to steal the show in big matches in the twilight of her career. A surprise selection to start the 2016 Women’s FA Cup final aged 37, having required ankle surgery in 2015, Smith shone under the famous Wembley arch in the number 10 role. That display was typical of the enduring class that saw her shortlisted for the 2015 Women’s Players’ Player of the Year award when she was 36.

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THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT.  BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, WE CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

TX:  1.5.17 – Ep 14. Kelly Smith MBE – football legend on commitment, retirement and love of the game

HOST:  TAMMY PARLOUR

TP: Welcome to A Question of Performance. I’m Tammy Parlour and in this series I’ll be talking with leading figures from sport and business about what improves, limits and drives performance. Join me for 20 minutes of discussion twice a month to hear a range of views on what it means to be successful, how to cope with failure and what people have learnt along the way.

[Music]

Today, I’m talking with, arguably, England’s greatest ever football player, Kelly Smith. Kelly has dedicated her whole life to playing football and recently retired from international duty after 20 years. We talk about commitment and being in the public eye, retirement and her life on the other side of the sport. As opening question though, I wanted to get a feel for what she saw as the highlights or the parts of her career that she took most pride in.

KS: I can’t really pinpoint specifically one thing there are numerous things that I’m proud of. Obviously, playing for Arsenal was a childhood dream and playing for a club that I supported as a kid and loved with all my heart to represent that club for so many years – and win trophies for that club was a proud moment for me: FA cups, league titles, the Champions League in 2007, that’s a highlight for me because no other British club, at this moment, has been crowned Champions of Europe. And, at that time, our team was formidable, we were unbeatable and it was a pleasure to play in that side, so every time I’ve worn the Arsenal shirt is always a proud moment. And then obviously my England debut at the age of 16 against Italy and went on to win 117 caps over a 20 year period, representing your country you can’t explain the feeling of pulling the shirt on – the three lions. I’ve played in two World Cups, three European championships and the Olympics and I’ve got fond memories of all of them. I’ve won a silver medal in the European championships, so that’s another highlight. Obviously the Olympics was an amazing feat, no Great Britain side has ever represented the Olympics in women’s football and do to it at Wembley…playing against Brazil in front of 75,000. And just experience the Olympics as a whole because as a child, I certainly never dreamed of playing in an Olympics because the vision wasn’t there and women’s football never had a team a Great Britain team to represent Great Britain at the Olympics. So to experience the Athlete’s Village and wear the Great Britain badge and just experience that it’s the biggest tournament in the world, the biggest experience I’ve ever had, and that was a pleasure too.

So they’re probably the three things that spring to mind – obviously, meeting the Queen is another one when I received my MBE for services to women’s football, and my family had a day out and it was a very proud moment for me to be recognised for that. So probably, actually, there’s four there that I’ve just listed so I would say them.

TP: It’s an astonishing list of achievements. Did you achieve what you wanted to?

KS: For me, all those that I’ve just explained, I never set out to achieve them. I’m just Kelly from Watford that has loved playing football and had a passion for it and knew I had a talent from probably a very young age and a gift that I worked extremely hard to hone in on my skills. And I just gave everything to be the best player that I could be and I set out to just reach levels or wanted to play for England; I never knew where that would take me obviously, that took me to America on a soccer scholarship. And then – yeah, it’s just led along the way, but I really never set any goals out from a young age because there was no real structure to women’s football back when I was 13, 14, 15.

TP: The game has changed massively whilst you’ve been playing it’s changed from predominantly an amateur one to where some clubs employ fulltime players, fulltime coaches and even fulltime strength and condition staff. What has been the impact of that from your perspective on the game?

KS: There have been so many changes since I first started and it’s now come full circle. I was training two nights a week with Arsenal in the JBC centre up at Highbury and it was amateur, we weren’t getting played to play. Now, obviously, I’ve finished my career, the game is in a very healthy state and I just think the game, in general, the speed of play, the skill of the players, the understanding of the players, game knowledge, tactical awareness has come full circle and I think there’s a lot more money involved in women’s football now on the elite end. And there are some very good coaches involved in the women’s game, so the product on the field is a lot better and the standard is so much higher than when I first started. And, obviously, I think TV coverage and exposure is crucial for the women’s game so it’s in the public domain and knowledge that they can watch women’s football. For me, it’s about changing people’s opinions along the way; there are still a numerous amount of people out there that don’t respect women’s football, but along the way we’ve gained a lot more fans, [unclear speech 5:32] are up in the FA WSL each season, an obviously the England games from the national team are ranked fifth in the world, the highest they’ve ever been and the attendances are creeping up and the exposure is really on the England national team at the minute having won the bronze medal in the 2015 World Cup in Canada. So I think the exposure that the media give it helps raise the profile of the game and the players become household names and then the young girls that are starting out on football or currently in football can look up to the players that are in the national team, and it sets the whole excitement amongst that generation of players.

TP: The game in England wasn’t necessarily in a position to nurture your talent when you were coming onto the stage, do you regret that you had to move to America to play at the level that you wanted, or was that just part and parcel of what was needed to happen to play the sport?

KS: There are no regrets in my career it’s just I was born at this time and just that was the state of the game during the age that I was and there were no opportunities for me to really progress myself as a professional training every day. So the opportunity came for me to go to America, training every day and getting an education and a life experience and I took that with open arms and really cherished being given that opportunity and lived the life to the fullest out there, I took in everything. And I learnt so much about myself and myself as a player – the American game is a little bit different to how it is England it’s a lot more physical and fitter, players are fitter – well, they were at the time, so I learnt how to adapt my game differently over there and came back and obviously helped England with that experience that I had.

TP: People have said that you are England’s greatest ever female player and that you were the first England woman superstar on the global stage was that your intention, was that a bi-product of just you playing the game?

KS: Yeah I think so, I think a by-product is probably the best way to put it, I just set out to be the best player I could be and help England and help Arsenal along the way; I wanted to reach good heights, I wanted to play in international tournaments; I wanted to develop my skills and hone in on them and just be the best player that I could be in whatever came along the way – it just happened, it wasn’t that I went out seeking for it, I think the game has obviously evolved and there’s more attention on it now, and the past few years in order for me to have got that attention and helped raised the profile of the women’s game.

TP: When did you realise that you were becoming famous?

[Laughter]

KS: That’s kind of an awkward question because I don’t view myself as being famous, I just think I’ve been involved in women’s football for a long time and I am a recognisable face within the game. But I don’t really recall a moment where I thought, ‘Do you know what, I’m famous.’ I get recognised walking down the street, in the supermarket and when I attend football matches especially, so yeah…I wouldn’t say I’m famous, I’d say [laughs] recognisable.

TP: Yes, I wrote down, because you said earlier a few minutes earlier that you’re just Kelly from Watford and that’s so much how you come across, yet you are a global superstar. What is it like being recognised then, because I know you’re a very private person as well, what’s it like when you realise you are at that superstar level?

KS: [Laughs] Yeah, I’ve struggled with it at first it was quite uncomfortable because I would be out in a supermarket or something and somebody would be staring me and I’m like, ‘Why are they staring at me, it’s weird?’ But, obviously, then they’ll come up and they say, ‘Hi, are you Kelly Smith?’ and I’d be like ‘Yeah,’ and it just made me feel a bit…

TP: Do you ever say no?

KS: I have…

TP: [Laughs].

KS: …on a few occasions when I’ve not wanted to be bothered and I know that’s the wrong thing to do. But, yeah, no I just think it’s taken a while a couple of years just to get used to it really because it’s random people coming up to you and wanting to have a conversation and I struggled with that for a while because I am quite an introvert and quite shy. But I think I’ve learnt to deal with it over the years and learnt techniques of just to become across more confident than I probably feel and probably that I am. And now it doesn’t bother me if someone stops and says hello, I’m probably the one asking more questions back at them because they’re kind of star struck and they just stand there looking at you, so it’s uncomfortable but I’ve learnt how to overcome that questions back and then interacting with them differently.

TP: Yes. Did have an impact on your game at all, do you think?

KS: No, I wouldn’t say so. I think I was so focussed and driven when I was on that pitch nothing else mattered. I just wanted to win and play well and score goals and set up goals for my team, that famous thing that you’re talking about wasn’t even at the forefront of my mind.

TP: Yeah, 20 years is a long time to have been playing sport at the level you have, how have you been able to last that long?

KS: Good question.

[Laughter]

You make me feel really old right now.

TP: Well I think I’m older than you, so…

[Laughter]

…let’s say we’re both young.

KS: Yeah, young at heart.

TP: Yes.

KS: Just for my love and passion of the game and wanting to succeed and win trophies, that’s what’s been my driver for a number of years. I’ve had many injuries along the way and I’ve been out of the game for four or five years with injuries, long term injuries, and I’ve always had that drive to come back and be better as an individual and as a person. The number of times that I would want to quit due to the repetitiveness of my injuries and the emotional damage that it was doing to me, but I’m a fighter and I always come back, which I’m very proud of. Yeah and I just wanted to play for Arsenal and wanted to keep playing for England and your career is only short as a footballer so to quit early due to an injury or a setback, I didn’t want to do that, I would probably have viewed myself as a failure. I wanted to play for as long as I can then I’ve had enough advice over the years that people have told me don’t retire too soon you’ll regret it, and you’ll know when the time is right with your own body, and I felt like the last couple of years in the back of my mind I thought I know it’s come to an end because…

TP: This was going to be my question, how do you know when it’s the right time to retire?

KS: I think a lot of my peers of a similar age group that I was playing with at Arsenal were leaving the club, their contracts weren’t getting renewed or they were moving on, and the kids were coming through and I felt I didn’t really have a lot in common with them in the dressing room, I felt like more of a mother figure than a team mate at times, which I was more than happy to take on, but you just look around the changing room and you think there’s new fresh blood coming in. And on the training field, I wasn’t training as much as I would have liked due to just tiredness in my body and the impact that my body has had playing football over the years that I was only training two or three days a week, and even though I could keep up with everyone on the field and that it wasn’t a problem it was just…

TP: The body needs a different recovery?

KS: Yeah, it takes longer for me to recover after games. And then there were games – certainly last year in the FA WSL where I thought I would have made the squad, and I wasn’t in the squad I was in the stands and I just thought probably is this how I really want to go out just a bit part player? And I thought, do you know what, I want it to be on my terms, I don’t want it to be on an injury or the manager phasing me out, so I think even though I probably made the most that I’ve played for Arsenal I was as fit and health as the last season. And, to be fair, I think could have played another couple of years and managed my body with the way that I had, but I think obviously I wanted to have a child and focus on my family and my body clock was ticking and I felt that my enjoyment a little bit of it was fading away and I think when I’ve loved the game for so long as I have and that started to fade a little bit, then I thought, do you know what, the time is right.

TP: Now is the time, yeah.

KS: Yeah.

TP: Talk about life since retirement then. You’re now very much on the other side of football, what’s it like looking through the other lens of coach of commentator, are you seeing football differently?

KS: Yeah [laughs] certainly. Being a coach is so different to obviously being a player, when you return up as a player all you’re focussed on is yourself and going out and performing and obviously your team mates, but as a coach there’s a lot of planning going on behind the scenes, a lot of prep work, a lot of communication to the players and man management or female management of players should I say? And it was replying to emails, setting up coaching sessions, talking to your players it’s just a whole different ballgame.

TP: I sound exhausted [laughs] just listening to it?

KS: Yeah it’s been an eye opener, but I’m still obviously on my coaching badges and learning so much about myself and about my coaching style and how I can develop and help the players in a different way.

TP: Is it weird being…because you’ve been performing at an incredibly high level to then go start to coaching and you’re saying you’re getting your coaches badges to be sort of in that learning zone again, is that weird, is that exciting?

KS: Yeah it’s both of them. It’s difficult too because as a player, as I said, you just go out and you go and perform that’s all I’ve known for 20 odd years, but as a coach it’s all about communicating and getting your message across and your points across and making sure your players understand where you’re coming from and what you’re asking of them. So even for me at times it’s extremely hard to breakdown what I’m trying to get across because as a player you do it naturally, but to physically go in and stop sessions and put your idea across and make sure they see the pictures it’s challenging, very challenging. And I know I’m at the bottom of the ladder and I’m probably not very good and where obviously just starting out I’ve got a long long way to go and I want to learn as much as possible.

TP: This podcast is about performance, it’s about different people’s views on what success is, what is success to you, what does that mean?

KS: As an individual, success for me is winning trophies, winning FA cups; winning league titles and playing for your country is success for me. If you look at it like that, for me, taking a stepping back after my retirement I think I’ve had success in helping raise the profile of the women’s game over the years. It’s probably not all about winning trophies it’s about raising the profile of the women’s game and seeing that it’s in such a healthy state right now and there’s so much more than can be done for the women’s game and I feel like it can actually go to another level again. So for me that’s been a success seeing it from playing for a team called Wembley when I first started to a couple of men and their dogs in the park to now playing in front of a few thousand, that for me is a success and having the games on TV is a success and seeing England do so well and being the highest ranked that they’ve ever been is a success. But the next success is obviously for England – I keep speaking about England because I’m so passionate about the national team – is for them to win the Euros this summer in Holland.

TP: And chances of that?

KS: Yeah, I certainly think they’ve got a fantastic chance having seen them play in the She Believes Cup they’re very well organised, they’ve got a good manager behind them. It’s going to be difficult, teams such as Germany, Norway and Sweden have all got a chance of winning, but I think England need that extra bit of luck along the way, which they’re more than capable of getting. It’s going to be a tough feat but one that I think they can do.

TP: I’ve just got some quick fire question for you. What did you eat for breakfast?

KS: [Laughs]. I had Special K cereal with some raisins put on top.

TP: Brilliant. What’s your favourite piece of sports kit?

KS: Favourite piece of kit? I only ever wore one sports kit when I was in England and that’s the Arsenal training strip.

TP: Brilliant.

KS: Although it is an ugly colour its grey bottoms and a red and grey top and when you wear the whole outfit with the jacket you actually look like you’ve got your pyjamas on because it’s all grey…

TP: [Laughs].

KS: …it’s disgusting; I don’t know what Puma and Arsenal were thinking putting that colouration together. I can’t wait for it to change!

TP: Fantastic! Sporting hero?

KS: Sporting hero within football was Ryan Giggs of Manchester United, I think because we’re of a similar age, similar position on the field, both left footed and both attacking players. And I modelled my game and certain things that he did on the pitch I tried to emulate and copy and I learnt so much from watching him breaking his game and brought into my game and then obviously became the player that I have been today.

TP: Most useless piece of advice you have received or given to somebody else?

KS: [Laughs]. Useless piece of advice? I can’t answer that one I’m afraid.

TP: If not that, then let’s flip it around or a great piece of advice that you were given?

KS: Play with a smile on your face because it is the best game for me in the world to be a part of, and there’s no better feeling than going out there with your friends in a park or in the street, in the playground or at Wembley playing football with your friends is just a phenomenal feeling.

TP: Greatest passion outside of sport?

KS: [Laughs]. My dogs, I absolutely love dogs! I’ve got two dogs, one is a Boston Terrier and one is Scottish Deer Hound and they’re dear to my heart and I walk them every day over Hampstead Heath Park and get so much enjoyment from seeing them run and chase each other and play fight. You get to meet people over the park too and talk about dogs it’s quite cheesy [laughs].

TP: And I’m not sure whether listeners will actually be able to hear a bit of snoring in the background [laughs] but…best performance enhancer?

KS: Imagery, I was taught it from a sports psychologist or the England setup years ago and that certainly help me go out and perform to the high levels that I did. And what I was taught was just to take myself off to a quiet place, your bedroom or your coach or wherever, close your eyes and envision yourself moving across the pitch doing things successfully, so maybe taking a few players on and that feeling of beating a player and then shooting and scoring a goal and that feeling of doing that maybe like making a tackle and then coming out the other side with the ball, all positive imagery stuff. And just do that for three or four minutes and then you come out of that and you have all those memories edged in your brain and then you go and perform and that certainly helped me.

TP: You relive that experience?

KS: Yeah.

TP: Well it’s been fantastic talking to you today, Kelly.

KS: Thanks for having me on.

TP: Thank you.

[Music]

TP: Thanks for listening. You can follow the conversation on Twitter, Facebook and also don’t forget to subscribe online to aquestionofperformance.com.

[Music]
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Ep 14. Cath Bishop- world champion rower on how culture impacts performance

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In episode 14 we talk with three-time Olympian and former world champion rower, Cath Bishop about how culture impacts performance. We discuss competition, how she was chosen as the ‘last resort’ for her University crew, the psychological challenges of coming second and her pride in becoming world champion in 2003.

Cath Bishop is a former Olympic medalist rower and respected diplomat who has spent time in some of the world’s most hostile conflict zones. She is also a visiting professor at the Surrey School of Business and Chair of the Cambridge University Women’s Boat Club.

In partnership with Katherine Grainger she was World Champion in the coxless pair in 2003, and in 2004 they won a silver medal at the Olympic Games.

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THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT.  BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, WE CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

TX:  15.4.17 – Ep 14 Cath Bishop- world champion rower on how culture impacts performance

HOST:  TAMMY PARLOUR

TP: Welcome to “A Question of Performance”. I’m Tammy Parlour and in this series, I’ll be talking with leading figures from sport and business about what improves, limits, and drives performance. Join me for twenty minutes of discussion twice a month to hear a range of views and what it means to be successful, how to cope with failure and what people have learnt along the way.

TP: Today, I’m with a former World Champion rower, Cath Bishop. Cath competed in three Olympics and shares some fascinating insight into the effect of culture on performance. In partnership with Katherine Grainger, she was World Champion in the coxless pair in 2003, and in 2004 they won a Silver Medal at the Olympic Games in Athens. She is also a visiting Professor at The Surrey School of Business and Chair of the Cambridge University Boat Club. Thank you very much for talking with me today Cath. I read an interview that you did, I think back in 2003, and you said about rowing that you had no intention or reason to take up rowing, and actually found it to be quite a dull spectator sport. So, I’m interested to know how do you go from finding something quite dull, to not only getting involved, but actually committing so much to the sport, that you become an Olympic medallist. How does that happen?

CB: Yes, it’s not logical I don’t think. So, it’s a strange story really I think. I went to a very ordinary state primary school where I grew up in Essex, and then went on to secondary school, and I suppose sport never really happened for me as a child. I didn’t come from a particularly sporty family, so we weren’t out in the park doing lots of sporting stuff, so I probably didn’t have a lot of fitness as a child, and it didn’t inspire me at school. We did hockey and netball, and I wasn’t very good at either, really. I just have memories of standing on this freezing cold hockey pitch and remembering how much it hurt when that hard ball hit your ankles, and so I wasn’t able to get involved somehow. I felt like a spectator always to sport and it just wasn’t for me. And the school reports confirmed that, that “Cath isn’t very sporty, but it’s okay, she can do other things so let’s not worry about it” and so I just assumed really, and was happy to say, “well, the evidence is there, the teachers have told me I’m not sporty, so that’s it” and when I went to University therefore, I didn’t expect to take up sport. As far as rowing was concerned, I had watched the boat race and thought, “well that all looks very repetitive, I’ve got no idea really what that must feel like, and I’m not able to really relate to them at all. So, it wasn’t something that I thought, “oh, I’m going to Cambridge, I really want to take up rowing”. You go to that initial freshers’ fayre where there are all these different types of clubs. There was a huge stall for rowing, a huge buzz around it. Lots of people with clipboards, lots of people signing up, and somebody came up to me “do you want to sign up? You’re good and tall, that would be great” and I just looked at her in horror and said, “why would I sign up? I’m not sporty and I don’t like getting up early in the morning” and I could already see that rowing was something that happened very early in the morning, and I’d worked my butt off to get to University and for me, it was about sitting up late at night solving the universe. It didn’t really fit into what I was going to do, or what I thought I was going to do. So, I didn’t sign up, and I didn’t really sign up for anything. I was quite overwhelmed by actually where was I going to put my time? I quite wanted to get involved in politics, arrived with quite a lot of interest in that area but a little bit of debating at the Union and actually felt I really didn’t fit in there. So, that didn’t really come to anything, and a month or so into term, lots of people had signed up for this rowing thing, and they were forever talking about it, and there was a huge buzz around it when they arrived at breakfast in the mornings having been out horrifically early to train, and I watched them a little bit and thought, “I slightly envy that camaraderie they’ve got” but still thought, “it’s not for me. It can’t be for me. It’s just not something that I could do”.

TP: And is that because of what you’d been told at a younger age?

CB: Yes, exactly. I just didn’t have any physical confidence. For me, sport was a very narrow experience that hadn’t been particularly positive. So, I didn’t have any other field of reference to think, “this might be different” and I’m just very lucky really that somebody who had become a good friend in the room next to me was doing the rowing, and knocked on my door one afternoon, and said “I need a massive favour, Cath. You’re our last resort because we know you really don’t want to do this rowing thing, but we’re a man short in our beginner’s crew. We need eight people to do it”.

TP: Was that true or was it a mischievous way of getting you involved?

CB: Oh no, it was true.

TP: It was true.

CB: Yes. I mean, nobody at that point had any sense that I was going to.

TP: [Over speaking] that you might become an Olympic medallist.

CB: Yes, it really wasn’t obvious in any way, and so they bribed me with alcohol really and said, “look come out tomorrow morning. You’ll be fine. We’re all beginners. We’re all rubbish” and all the things that went through my head, “it’ll be embarrassing, I’ll look stupid, I’ll be awful at it, I won’t enjoy it”, you know, they batted all that away and said “look, for goodness sake, don’t be so silly. What have you got to lose? Just try something different” and I’m grateful for them, that they persisted, and that there was in my head somewhere a little voice that went, “come on, what have you got to lose? Why don’t you try it?” and so I did. And so the next morning I got up horrifically early.

TP: How early are we talking?

CB: Oh, 5:30, 5:45, that sort of thing.

TP: Yes, that sounds horrific.

CB: Yes, exactly. And I got on my bike and went to a different part of Cambridge to where the boathouses were on the river. I have to say even that, we’re all cycling down the road together, there was obviously no traffic that early in the morning, and even that was quite thrilling. I didn’t know where we were going. There was a huge buzz when you get to the river, all these novice crews zigzagged up and down the river, shouting here and there. Chaos, but there was a buzz around it. The river was very beautiful first thing in the morning. It was all very new. It was a long way from that hockey pitch, and that’s how it started. It didn’t start in any spectacular way. In fact, in my first outing I broke a blade because they put me at the back of the boat and I was holding on so tightly to my oar that as we drifted towards the bank, it crumpled along against the bank, which was their mistake for really not putting me in the middle of the boat. I wanted to get out, and they said “no, you’re not getting out”. The coach went round. We’d hardly gone more than a few yards. He said “I’ll get you another oar” and so we carried on. And in a way, it was a lovely beginning because I just fell in love with the sport. We were the second novice crew so there was no expectation on us.

TP: Well, you say you fell in love with the sport. Was it the camaraderie? Was it the physicality of it? What kept you there at the beginning?

CB: It was a combination of things. I think largely that river environment was just something, I just loved being out on the river. It was just so different from anything I’d experienced before, and you’re so close to people in a rowing boat in a way that on a hockey pitch you’re not. You were all spread out. Actually, I could just stand there on a hockey pitch and do nothing. You can’t sit in a rowing boat and do nothing, so therefore I had no choice to opt out, so you start opting in. And of course, once you start opting in, then you’re in it. You’re doing it. You’re trying it. You want to get better at it. You want to work with other people and you don’t want to let them down. So, for me, it’s a tighter team experience if you like, and that was great.

TP: So how did you go from being on the University team to being in the GB team that went, I think your first Olympics was at the Atlanta Olympics?

CB: That’s right. So, I started at college level and crept through each level gradually, and then got into the University level, and by the time I left University, the coaches said, “you’ve got potential”. We had a really good standard of coaches who had worked with the national team, and they said to myself and another girl, “you have potential to carry on and go to the Olympics. No guarantees, and it’s a lot of extra work, and you’re here and there’s still a big gap to where you’ve got to be, but we think it’s possible” and that was another moment of thinking, “well I had expected to go and get a job, and my parents were expecting me to go and get a job” but now I had this other option that looked very vague and came with no guarantees of what would happen, but if course there’s also something you couldn’t stop thinking about. Thinking, “well where could that go?”.

TP: Yes. You were in three Olympics; Atlanta, Sydney and Athens. You medalled in the last one. What was different? What enabled you to get the medal in the last where it didn’t in the previous two?

CB: A lot changed. I was very lucky to come into that, in that last Olympiad really, to be able to benefit from the huge difference that Lottery funding and the English Institute of Sport coming onstream made. So, when I first went to the Olympics in Atlanta, life was very different for a women’s minority sport who up to that point had won no Olympic medals, and I was very excited to get into the team, but pretty quickly it was made clear to me that women’s rowing was not a performance priority for the rowing team, because we weren’t delivering results and the men were, and we didn’t have really a means of changing that. We didn’t have paid coaching. We didn’t have good equipment. We were struggling to survive, holding part-time jobs to try and keep going and of course then not recovering enough. So, in that downward cycle really, and that was transformed by the Lottery in 1997 that suddenly meant things were put on an equal footing and that we had a paid coach, and we had the facilities that we needed, and of course, results started to come. Now they didn’t come immediately, and I had a really difficult up to Sydney where physically I was improving and coming into my peak, but we didn’t have a positive training environment. We had a very difficult coaching regime that didn’t really bring the best out of people. It was very tough. It was absolutely last man standing, it was quite a negative competitive environment. I always thought that competitive is competitive, but I experienced different competitive environments that were set up differently, and in that one, it was very much one person’s win is another person’s loss and that doesn’t help everyone to improve. It was tough, grim, survival really and by the time I got to the Olympics, I was exhausted from just surviving that and it hadn’t been a positive experience, and it certainly didn’t allow me to perform at my best. That was really difficult to come back from and at that point, I stepped away for a year and felt, “well maybe that was it”.

TP: You say it didn’t allow you to perform at your best. Do you think that was other people’s experience as well?

CB: Yes, certainly we had a few people who did well and of course we did win the first women’s rowing medal there, but we had a large proportion of the team that didn’t. So essentially, four people did well, but neither the eight, the double or the pair. So, again, that was 12 people who did not reach their peak performance and so I was again fortunate that in that last Olympiad, we ended up in a different coaching setup that suddenly there was a much more positive basis to it, that therefore you might beat somebody in the team on one day, but that was good for you and it was good for them as well, because they’re doing the same programme, there’s no reason why they can’t improve, and they’re doing other things right, and if you don’t do some of those things, then they’re going to beat you next week, and it lifted everyone up. It was a very different competitive setup.

TP: So, the “let’s improve together”?

CB: Exactly, instead of a zero-sum game almost that there are losers in the first one, and there are people who will drop out the bottom. This was much more about everyone helping each other to improve performance and that was a radically different experience. The support by that point we’d had for several years in terms of the quality of nutrition advice and psychology advice and that sort of thing, so I’m just so grateful that I was able to experience that Olympiad and I feel sorry for all the women who were there in the nineties before those opportunities were there, who were excellent athletes, but didn’t have that environment or opportunity to actually be the best they could be.

TP: With Katherine Grainger, you were the first GB pair to medal in that event. Is that important? And what I mean by that is, is that important to you, and also is that important to people who come after you?

CB: I don’t know to people who come after. I think to us there was so much that was new. There were so many firsts for the women’s rowing team. Everything was a first really. Getting consistent results, getting an Olympic medal, getting World Championships medal in that boat class, winning the World Championship, so it felt like all the time we were doing things that hadn’t been done before and that weren’t expected of us, and so we were proving people wrong if you like. Proving that women could do it. So, I think there was a real incentive that we’d now gotten rid of some of the barriers to success. We’ve still got to do this now. We’ve got to make this happen because if we don’t, then when is it going to happen. So, I think there was a sense that we were slightly pioneering if you like, and that was a spur to us. “Let’s prove we can do it because we know we are capable of it”. So, I think it was an additional spur but ultimately, you’re trying to be the best you can be with whatever situation you’ve got and in a way that didn’t change I would say, it’s just that there were things helping us to get closer to that.

TP: What enables you to keep that focus when you’re going through failures for instance, and you talked about leaving the sport for a year was it?

CB: Yes.

TP: How do you regain that focus?

CB: Certainly, stepping away was essential. I was crushed by coming ninth in Sydney and having such a difficult experience throughout that Olympiad, and I had lost a lot of self-belief and in a way, I still had the same hunger that I wanted to achieve that, but I could no longer see that it was possible, or I doubted so much whether I could do it.

TP: So, what changed?

CB: I took myself out of the environment for a year. I actually started my job at The Foreign Office and took a complete step back and of course with perspective comes a different view on what’s happening and a sense that actually, it was unfinished business. I hadn’t been able to deliver my best, I wanted another go and I maybe needed to just get that out of my system. I needed to prove to myself that that was the best I could do or maybe there was an opportunity to have one more go. So, it’s putting that to rest I guess. I didn’t feel happy that walking away from the sport with a ninth place was the best I could do. So, it was, “well, put yourself in the frame again, with no guarantee you’re doing to do better, but maybe you can change it”.

TP: At that sort of elite level I imagine every little change that you make has some…the idea of marginal gains.

CB: Mm, definitely.

TP: What were the sort of small little changes that you made that made a massive difference?

CB: I think in that last Olympiad, it was lots on the psychological side. It was having more experience, being less bogged down in small day-to-day crises, stepping back a bit more. The fact that I’d gone into a working world gave me a huge perspective that actually going backwards in a boat as fast as you can isn’t always the most important thing in the world, and that was enormously helpful. There’s other stuff going on there. You get so obsessed with a tiny dip in performance, or one bad score somewhere and it just stopped me getting bogged down in those little dips.

TP: So a pressure release?

CB: Becoming less deep really, so you know, getting my mind off it at times, being able to switch off from it, being able to look act actually what’s important here, and maybe you had a small dip for a good reason, so it’s not indicative of “things are going into terminal decline here”, it’s just, “it’s got a reason, so let’s learn from that and move on” and rather than dwelling on the negative stuff, focusing more on the positives and really thinking, “you’ve got one shot now, you’re not going to keep going after this” and it was very clear in my mind. So, sort of “don’t hold yourself back, don’t limit yourself” because I was doing a lot of that. It was hard to shake off a lot of early negative experiences. I’d lost a lot of races. It’s hard to shake that off and you’re aware of other people looking at your record and thinking, “well, we wouldn’t put money on her to win an Olympic medal this time” and people saying to me “don’t come back again. You’ve got a good job, you’ve been to two Olympics, that’s great, walk away” and it’s hard to think, “gosh, I’m going to put myself in a hugely vulnerable position again and may fall flat on my face” but at the same time.

TP: You did come back and you got Silver in Athens which is phenomenal. I’ve read research that says that people who get Bronze medals are happier than people who get Silver medals. Can you respond to that at all? Does that seem like a fair assessment?

CB: Yes, I’ve read that research too. Yes, Gold medallists and Bronze medallists are so much happier, yes. The Bronzing medallists are so happy they didn’t come fourth. I can. I think at one level when we crossed the line, I felt devastated we hadn’t achieved our objective, but very quickly, I think I felt, going back to my earlier comment, “do you know, I can live with this. I can walk away with second and it isn’t what I wanted, it isn’t what I dreamed of, it isn’t what I went out to do, but I can walk away and live with it” and I very quickly I think came around to that reckoning. That said, I do, I’ve thought about it since then in my own mind, there’s this question “is it okay to come second?” and I find myself going over that. For years, I’ve gone through that question and thought about it from different angles and argued it both ways and thought about how other people would argue that. You’re in a world where only winning counts. There’s so much that values that Gold medal above everything else, but I think increasingly, maybe you get mellow with age, there’s a huge experience that comes with, whatever the result is, and facing up to that result and the world can’t exist with people who only win. The Olympics can’t work if you only have winners, so you’ve got to have people of high quality in all those other positions, but it is a question I think about a lot.

TP: It’s funny isn’t it, this “I came second” or “I came second in the world”.

CB: You can be so quick to dismiss a result that isn’t first, and I think that’s a shame. And I think I look more broadly now. I think there’s a real danger that we lose so much that is good and when I look at my young five year old son going into the playground and talking about winners and losers and all that, and already there’s this sort of categorisation going on, and it breaks my heart really, because there’s so many different talents in different ways and there’s a real risk we lose that if we try and put it into a simple winning-losing brackets and I think that’s true of so much that we get excluded from things early on in our school experiences, childhood experiences, because we haven’t won at something, in whatever that is, not just in the sporting world, and I think we lose a lot by that. I kind of wish they would, in the Olympics, want to run a newspaper that has all the stories about all the people who don’t win, and actually sometimes they’ve achieved much more because of the hurdles that have been in their way, and you can’t say that that doesn’t have a value, and it’s such a shame that we perhaps don’t put the value on that as much and lose out I think in some way.

TP: When you’re looking back at your rowing career, is that Silver medal your highlight? The thing that stands out? Or is there something else that when you look back at the rowing career?

CB: I’d say the highlight is the year before when we won the World Championships, because we got the Gold medal, we heard the National Anthem, we were on the top step, and although to the outside world the Olympics counts highest, I think to me, again I take great comfort that we had one day when it all came together and it worked and I’m again, entirely grateful that that happened, because so many people have challenges and injuries and all sorts of things can happen that you can’t control that can throw you off. So I think for me, that was pure joy. It wasn’t in any way guaranteed. I’d literally come back that year. I’d almost not made the team because I messed up one of the trials. Nobody would have put their money on that and that was a result of pure joy and pure achievement for us as a pair really, against quite a few people who weren’t really backing us.

TP: Beyond sport then, you’ve moved on to do other things within your career. Was your experience of sport important to those other areas?

CB: Yes, lots. I think there’s a huge amount that sport trains you in. It gives you that drive and that discipline and when we were training, we used to say, sort of every day I’d think to myself, “why am I doing this?” and I could answer that question really clearly. I had such a clear goal, such a clear dream. It’s very inspiring on a daily basis and I still look for that. I still look for “why am I doing things” and I need to feel that there’s some purpose in it. So I think I’ll always have that driving force to get better at stuff, to keep learning, to never stop learning. Also, not to be put off easily, so again, that resilience just to keep going and actually things can turn out alright, however bad they’re looking. To keep finding new ways of doing things. So I think there’s a lot that’s helped me to persist in other challenging situations, certainly.

TP: This podcast is about performance. It’s about how different people see or define what success is. Do you know what success is for you and has that changed over time?

CB: Again, it’s like the Silver medal question. I think about that quite a lot, “what is success?” and perhaps what I started off thinking was success was probably defined more in medals, and actually now it’s defined much more in experience and integrity and how I behaved and things. And I look back, I don’t think really of the medals. I think more about how I behaved in different circumstances and how I dealt with really challenging mentally and physically challenging situations. So for me, success is about managing the difficult stuff, I think. The things that people don’t see, the less glamourous side of things, and really how you support others. That human element, again the relationships. The people you supported when they were having a bad time. For me, that’s the stuff that actually counts that I would say I was most proud of as those times when we stuck by each other when other people were doubting us, or doubting one of us. So, for me, success is actually much more around what you’ve done to support people around you and get the best out of everyone and not just be solely focused on yourself.

TP: Just some quick-fire questions then. What did you eat for breakfast?

CB: Today?

TP: Today, yes.

CB: I was standing up because I was getting my kids ready for school, and I had yoghurt with some nuts and seeds.

TP: Brilliant. Favourite piece of sports kit.

CB: That’s a difficult one because we wear a lot of Lycra in rowing and it’s hard to say that any piece of Lycra is particularly favourite, but I think my old University kit, where it all started, where things really changed and I suddenly, you know, the sport just became part of my life, it would be an old piece of Uni kit, now really falling apart.

TP: Sporting hero?

CB: Again, not one person. I did grow up watching the Olympics and particularly, was fascinated by the 1984, the Los Angeles Olympics that had Daily Thompson and Tessa Sanderson, and Ovett-Coe rivalry and Steve Redgrave, and there was something magical about watching all of that and I watched it like a Hollywood film, in that I thought, “wow, that’s absolutely amazing and not anything I would ever do” and so there was something that definitely inspired me from that Olympic era I think, and knowing and rowing with Katherine Grainger has been a really massive privilege.

TP: Most useless piece of advice you have been given or given to somebody else?

CB: I think it was people who said to me, when I was thinking about coming back for the third Olympics, all those people who said “oh don’t bother, don’t put yourself through it again. You’ve got a good job. Why would you do that again?” and I’m glad I didn’t listen to them.

TP: Greatest passion outside of sport?

CB: Music.

TP: Music? Okay.

CB: I love music. I grew up with a lot of music.

TP: Do you play?

CB: I play the piano and music is there for you in the good times and the bad times. It’s there for you however clever you are or however not clever you are, however rich you are, however poor you are. Music is something that can uplift me and I think all of us. Music is an important universal gift that we all have. I love music and I wish we could have more music in our worlds that we work in and live in and go to school in. All of that.

TP: Well, this might be the answer to the next question then, as well, but best performance enhancer?

CB: Yes, music is part of that. I think it’s the mindset really. It’s actually self-belief and a knowledge that you’ve done all you can and it’s time to go out and see what happens on the field of play.

TP: Brilliant, thank you so much Cath.

CB: You’re welcome.

TP: Thanks for listening. You can follow the conversation on Twitter, Facebook and also don’t forget to subscribe online to aquestionofperformance.com.

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Ep 7. Claire Bennett – on life after elite sport

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In episode 7, Claire Bennett talks about athlete transition. We explore life as an international athlete, the emotions associated with retirement and how she works with other elite athletes to shape their life after sport.

Until August 2012, Claire was a member of the Great Britain women’s foil fencing team and part of the World Class Performance Programme. She has represented Great Britain in European and World Championships since the age of 14. As captain of England Claire won individual Bronze and Team Gold at the 2010 Commonwealth Fencing Games. Whilst studying for her modern languages degree at Durham University she was British Universities Champion.

Since stopping fencing after 2012, Claire now wants to help inspire and encourage young people and adults alike to achieve their potential. She is a keen writer and motivational speaker. “I know first hand how much of a positive impact sport and mentoring can have on a person’s life. I have learnt so much about myself through sport. Therefore on a basic level I have a strong wish to give something back and share my experiences to help people achieve their potential.”

Claire is now the Athlete Manager at the Dame Kelly Holmes Trust and supports their team of elite athletes in their lives beyond sport. Claire is an Athlete Supporter of the Women’s Sport Trust and is involved with several organisations directed at women. She is dedicated to progressing women in sport and inspiring young girls to achieve their potential.

In her spare time she has written for the London Evening Standard as a columnist and for the Daily Telegraph in their Olympics section. Claire also commentates for Eurosport as their fencing expert.

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THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT.  BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, WE CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

TX:  1.1.17 – Ep 7. Claire Bennett – on life after elite sport

HOST:  TAMMY PARLOUR

[Music]

TP: Welcome to A Question of Performance. I’m Tammy Parlour and in this series I’ll be talking with leading figures from sport and business about what improves, limits and drives performance. Join me for 20 minutes of discussion twice a month to hear a range of views on what it means to be successful, how to cope with failure and what people have learnt along the way.

[Music]

Today I’m talking about athlete transition. My guest is Claire Bennett a former member of the GB Women’s Foil Fencing team. Claire captained England and won individual bronze and team gold in the 2010 Commonwealth Fencing Games. Now returned from international competition, she works as an athlete manager at the Dame Kelly Homes Trust helping other athletes to cope with life after sport.

When you look back at your international career, what stands out for you?

Claire Bennett - FencingCB: I think for me in terms of sporting success, what I was really proud of was captaining the England team to the Commonwealth gold medal in 2010. But now that I’ve got a bit more perspective – my life beyond sport now that I’ve transitioned, I think a very proud period was that sort of Olympic cycle where I committed myself fulltime to trying to qualify for London 2012. So I graduated in 2008 and just went for it and I really left nothing in the tank and I reflect on that period and I feel really proud of that now.

TP: It must be a difficult life for athletes because lack of funding often means you having to manage both a career and working and so forth whilst training, it must put a lot of pressure onto make both worlds work; would you agree with that?

CB: Yeah I think so, and especially for me coming from a minority sport, fencing, there was never a question I wanted always to have that safety net of going to university so I always struggling with academia or sporting commitments. I remember I missed Fresher’s week because I had the world championships, which [laughs] isn’t important but it was important at the time because I was missing on that. And I did need to seek private sponsorships; I wasn’t on the World Class Programme initially, so I had to write maybe 200 – I put together 200 sponsorship packs and I was knocking on lots of different organisation’s doors to get corporate funding. And, of course, that took time but for me the important thing was building up that support network and getting that funding in that I could every year until 2012 so that I could just dedicate wholeheartedly to what I wanted to do, which was qualifying for the Games.

TP: Why did you end up retiring?

CB: I think for me it was a time in my life where I had to start a new chapter really. It felt the right time, I was 27, I could have gone onto Rio if I’m honest because fencing is a skill sport so I absolutely could have gone onto Rio, but I just felt…I probably should say that I actually just missed out on qualifying for London 2012, and at the time, it was very very difficult, I sort of faced this inexplicable hurt that I always find it hard to articulate if I’m honest, it just felt like I’d been shot.

TP: Yes.

CB: And when you dedicate your life to something – I started when I was 10 years old and I went to my first world championships when I was 14, and really you do as athletes you put your body on your line, you put your life on hold. And I suppose my – not that I had an ego, but that was crushed and all my self-esteem had gone and I found it, if I’m honest, very difficult to move forward. But, the only sort of peace of mind that I had was that I knew it was the right time to stop for me, personally, I couldn’t bear putting myself through another Olympic cycle, or my family for that matter. And, actually, it was the right time to move on, I am professionally ambitious, I wanted to move out of home ultimately, although I was funded still living with parents at the time and there were other life goals that I wanted to achieve, so it was the right time then.

TP: How did you come to terms with that hurt and that loss? Or have you?

CB: Yeah, that’s a really good question actually because it does take athlete…every athlete has a different transition journey if you like, and they say normally it takes about two years for an athlete to transition, but it is very very different. So I suppose it is a fair of chunk time to get over that kind of grief, and it was definitely grief for me. When some people talk about the grief cycle and you at first you go through like shock and denial, then perhaps you really go down and you face depression, you go through a really difficult period, but then after that you start facing acceptance and then you realise that there is light at the end of the tunnel and you find a new meaningful way of life. It’s interesting when people do compare athlete transition to the grief cycle because it can be a real grieving period.

And I suppose to answer your question, Tammy, of how did I get through that period? Well it took quite a time and it was important for me to allow myself the time settle. As soon as I stopped fencing I wanted to do 101 things, which wasn’t the right thing [laughs] to do. I started writing a book, I wanted to climb Mount Everest because I was at peak physical condition and I had nothing to [laughs] do with my body if you like, so I wanted to do Mount Everest, and then I decided I wanted to join the bobsleigh team and go for Sochi [laughs]. So I guess how did I get over it was allowing myself that time and then luckily I met the Dame Kelly Holmes Trust in January 2013 and the charity really just sort of welcomed me with open arms and started to structure the hours of my day by offering me bits of employment and I became an athlete mentor inspiring young people facing disadvantage. And things like they put me in touch with a life coach who helped sort out conflicting thoughts and ideas about what I wanted to do next, and that was really important just to get a real single pointed focus about next steps and an action plan essentially. So it was just little things like that and, apart from anything, it was peer support as well, talking to other athletes going through transition and seeing other athletes have positive transitions and setting up their own business and being happy in their life beyond sport.

TP: You’re working for Dame Kelly Holmes Trust now…

CB: Yes.

TP: …which is fantastic, you’re an Athlete Manager, is that right?

CB: That’s right, yeah.

TP: So what does that involve?

CB: So yeah, I’m the Athlete Manager and I look after around 168 or so – [laughs] I’m being very precise because we’ve just done a report of active athletes that we’ve got at the Trust. So I support those two-fold really, I help them in their transitions in their life after sport, but also we help current athletes to think about their life beyond sport and with employment opportunities and upskills to become athlete mentors.

TP: Would you say the transition that you went through as an athlete is very similar to what you see other athletes going through?

CB: Yeah, there are definitely similarities, but I do think athletes go on different transition journeys as well. You have some athletes who feel really lost, who feel dejected and who are depressed and who might turn to alcohol or gambling, but you have other athletes who actually have spent a lot of time during their careers thinking about their life beyond sport and have therefore put themselves in a better position to be able to have that positive life when they retire. And I think it’s really important, and I would advise current athletes to really think about what else they can be doing along their sport to think about keep their eyes and their ears open for opportunities that arise and perhaps get into some volunteering and perhaps think about their personal, social and emotional development alongside their sport.

TP: Is it possible to sort of see beyond that when you’re going for the next competition where you’ve got Rio or Tokyo or whatever in your targets to think beyond that?

CB: It is difficult, you’re a funded athlete and your responsibility ultimately is to get a medal with that no compromise approach is to get a medal at the Olympic Games, so you have to be ruthless and relentless in your work ethic for your sport. With that said, I did understand the importance of doing other stuff and I did use to enjoy giving back and volunteering alongside the sport. But I suppose it’s also there is a culture thing and it is about getting everyone in your support team to back that up and be okay with you going out and doing some volunteer work or spending a bit more time on your personal development. For example, what I used to do after the world championships we might have two or three weeks downtime and I really wanted to become a sports journalist and television presenter at the time and I would go and get a work experience with the Evening Standard or the Daily Telegraph, so I was really trying hard to set myself up. I did, personally, experience a short amount of time where it was a difficult time for me to move forward, but I think it would have been much much harder had I not gone to get the work experience and focus a little bit on other stuff outside of my sport.

TP: Do the NGB’s do enough?

CB: You know, we’re getting to a stage where I think they’re starting to understand that it’s everybody’s responsibility to think about athlete welfare. And we’ve also got Tanni Grey- Thompson who’s leading on the Duty of Care or DCMS, which is an amazing amazing step forward. And I think now we’re in a position where UK Sport have the best system potentially in the world, the best world class system, they’ve have to be relentless, they’ve had to be ruthless in their approach because ultimately they had to deliver results and that’s what they’re paid to do. Now they’ve done that, which is absolutely fantastic, and I think they need to protect that because it’s working well and they need to carry on doing that, but, actually, perhaps there’s something in how can we enhance that? And how can we bring that athlete care that holistic side of things to enhance their performance even further? Because we did do independent research at the Dame Kelly Holmes Trust where it showed the benefits of working on your personal, social and emotional development and all of that underpins our athlete training programme at the Trust. And athletes who do that kind of training, they start to take more personal responsibility for their development and, actually, in the long run they have more personal social capital and feel more empowered and are better performing people.

TP: Yes. This podcast is about performance it’s about different people’s views about what success is and so forth, what’s success for you and I suppose also the follow-up question would be has that changed over time as your context has changed?

CB: Mmm, that’s a really good question. It’s definitely changed, success for me when I was a fulltime athlete was achieving and winning medals – bottom line – there is no hiding place in elite sport everyone says that, and that’s what you’re expected to do. And for me, actually, my self-esteem was based around achieving those world class results, and if I didn’t then it was the end of the world and I’d come home in an absolute mood and my parents would bear the brunt of it and blah blah. But success for me now is it’s still having that strong work ethic and being completely dedicated to what you do. But, actually, it’s about doing something that’s really meaningful to me that is rewarding and…I suppose yeah, bottom line is comes to doing something meaningful – I don’t want to repeat myself, but I’m not saying that going for an Olympic gold isn’t meaningful, but I suppose my idea of success is I’m doing something that I’m passionate about and that makes me feels alive as I did when I was fencing and which is meaningful and I feel like I’m giving back and I feel like I’m making a difference somewhere else, that’s success to me.

TP: Mmm, brilliant. Any advice you’d give to someone starting in competitive sport now?

CB: It’s a funny on isn’t it because I do think about…a lot of people have asked me what if you were to have children would you be happy if they went into the competitive environment and became an elite athlete? And because I know how tough it can be at the top – obviously it’s difficult, but my advice would be to be resilient and not let anybody set any limitations on what you can or can’t do, to just go for it wholeheartedly and leave nothing in the tent, because actually if you do that then whatever the outcome you can walk away feeling really proud and that’s the important thing.

TP: That’s brilliant. I’ve just got some quick fire questions for you.

CB: Okay.

TP: What did you eat for breakfast?

CB: Cereal and a cup of tea.

TP: Your favourite piece of sports kit?

CB: Probably my Flynet trainers, they’re really good.

TP: [Laughs] Okay. Sporting hero?

CB: Kelly Holmes, it’s got to be Kelly.

TP: Why? Other than she’s your boss!

CB: Yeah, other than she’s my boss, honestly she’s someone who never gave up, she achieved her sporting success very late on in her career. So she just showed huge amounts of resilience and, apart from that, she set up her charity to support athletes and young people. And she’s also like a complete businesswoman, entrepreneurial and doing lots of different… and set up a coffee shop where she lived in Kent, and so she’s someone who always strives to be the best at anything she does.

TP: Brilliant. Most useless piece of advice you have either given or received?

CB: Forget about your past, because I think it’s important to still remember your past but perhaps not dwell on your past.

TP: So build from it?

CB: Yeah. Exactly, yeah.

TP: Greatest passion outside of sport?

CB: It’s a hard…it’s going to be in between baking, because I do love baking cakes, like really passionate about baking cakes, but also [laughs], on the other hand, which is probably my bigger passion it is supporting others and getting the best out of others.

TP: And last one, best performance enhancer?

CB: Self-belief.

TP: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Claire, it’s been brilliant talking to you.

CB: Thank you, Tammy.

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TP: Thanks for listening. You can follow the conversation on Twitter, Facebook and also don’t forget to subscribe online to aquestionofperformance.com.

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