When the cheering stops, what does a star athlete do?
Retirement can be a shock for most people but especially for relatively young sports people, writes Alan Tyers
It must be extremely daunting to move from a structured life to one of uncertainties
What now? A question that most people face upon retirement, and one posed by rower Helen Glover in a current Radio Four series. Glover, herself, is considering hanging up the oars, and is speaking to sportspeople who have already called it a day to ask about their experiences: last week, Dame Kelly Holmes; this week, Gail Emms. It is a nicely made programme – Glover might consider broadcasting as an option.
Dame Kelly spoke about “a loss of identity”, and said that once she retired from her magnificent athletics career she “felt like a fraud” because she could no longer give herself the simple tag of “athlete” or “Olympian”.
She said “you have no name, no label” and instead would reel off to people a list of her ventures and projects, an attempt to ground herself and give meaning in her new life. The search for meaning and identity in retirement is something that a great many experience, although not everyone is doing it with two Olympic golds around their neck like Dame Kelly did and Glover will be.
And, of course, most of us are not taking this leap into the unknown in the first half of our thirties, like many athletes.
It must be extremely daunting to move from a highly structured life to one of possibilities and uncertainties.
Premier League footballers might be able to retire with enough money that they never have to work again, but that is true of few other sports, nor indeed for most footballers below the top tier.
While the highs and lows of competition may be extreme, the life of the athlete is often mundane, rigid and lacking in variety.
And the day-to-day is made up of tasks that are quantifiable: how many reps, how fast, how heavy? Real life affords few comforting metrics. How do you measure success as a parent, a spouse, a professional, a citizen, a human?
Tossed overboard from the glittering ship of sporting glory, washed up on the rocky beach of real life, it is a tough transition. Holmes said that she and her sporting peers had experienced all manner of problems, for instance depression or alcoholism. Behold the loneliness of the retired long-distance runner.
Connectivity, globalisation and the change from a manufacturing to a service economy are among the factors dictating that the working landscape is almost unrecognisable from the one in which the currently retired grew up.
A demographic time-bomb is ticking as people live longer: the ratio of working people to retired people is going to fall and fall. Sixty-five is not old at all, these days. Thirty-one, Glover’s age, seems barely into adulthood. Whatever job or role she takes on now, if she does retire, she has maybe got another 31 years of slog to look forward to. Maybe getting up early to row that boat does not look so bad after all.
The retirement of a sporting great strikes a profound chord for many of us: sometimes at the top, like Nico Rosberg, but much more often, in decline. The sight of the sportsperson who has gone on too long is as familiar as it is poignant. But understandable: simpler to struggle on as an also-ran than to take the leap into the unknown.
It is not a decision to envy, especially if the person has little life experience to fall back on other than the sweat of their brow in their tracksuit. The best days might well still be ahead, but they don’t give you any medals for them.
One to One: Gail Emms talks to Helen Glover (Tomorrow, 9.30am, BBC Radio Four)