Father convinced concussions led to snowboarder’s death
Tony Soutter fears risk to sportspeople after his daughter Ellie’s demise, he tells Jeremy Wilson
The more Tony Soutter reads and researches, the more he becomes convinced. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy is a neurodegenerative disease regularly associated with boxers and American footballers, but what of all those other sports where head impacts and concussions are also relatively common? And how does all this link to the major issue of mental health in sport and those athletes or former athletes who have suddenly died by suicide?
Soutter is now certain that his family’s life-changing “bolt from the blue”, when his daughter Ellie died on her 18th birthday, was ultimately caused by the concussions she suffered in the preceding months and the accumulated changes to her brain.
“To me, it’s conclusive when I read the studies,” he says. “CTE takes away the ability to think rationally and decide about something. It causes anxiety and stress. I’m 100 per cent in my mind, that is what she died of.”
Ellie had suffered her first concussions five years earlier but then several in the years leading up to her death, culminating in April 2018 when she had to be airlifted off a mountain to hospital. “I got there 7½ hours after her accident and she didn’t know who I was or where she was,” Soutter says. “I knew nothing about CTE but started reading about the NFL and athletes taking their own life for no reason after an article stated that Ellie was possibly the fourth freerider to die of CTE that year.”
The Ellie Soutter Foundation is now calling for sports bodies to introduce mandatory concussion tests that would establish a baseline “healthy” cognitive function – such as through reaction times, written and verbal tests – and then use this to evaluate whether it is safe to return to sport.
Shortly after snowboarder Ellie’s death, Soutter was contacted by Boston University’s CTE Centre but, as Ellie had already been cremated, he could not make a brain donation. CTE can be diagnosed only after death.
Soutter does also highlight issues of funding and the pressures placed on young athletes who dream of Olympic glory. He and Ellie had moved to Les Gets in the French Alps when she was nine and he describes her as my “best friend, my rock, my total buddy”.
She had won bronze – Team GB’S only medal – at the Youth Olympic Festival in Turkey in 2017 but missed a flight to go training with the Team GB squad shortly before she died. Ellie was also acutely aware of what her Olympic dream was costing her family. “It was escalating,” Soutter says. “A season could cost €42,000. She loved the sport, and really wanted to go to the next Olympics, but would get very upset at times when I entered her for competitions because of the cost. I have had thousands of emails, a lot from athletes, whether they knew Ellie or didn’t, who are aware that they are going through these pressures themselves.
“There is huge pressure on young athletes. It’s all backwards in the UK. If you are very good at sport in France, they pay for your education and put you in a sportif school, so you continue your sport for your country. That education is vital, otherwise they are not getting the work skills or social skills.”
As well as concussion and mental health awareness, the Ellie Soutter Foundation supports young athletes who are trying to pursue their sporting dreams. “We want to bring awareness to coaches and athletes that they are going to face these pressures and give them some tools to help,” Soutter says. “Coaches also have a duty of care and need to be aware that their athletes are going through these problems. Just because they turn up late one day, it’s possibly not because they are lazy and didn’t get out of bed.
“I spent the last four years of Ellie’s life on the phone and internet trawling for money, trying to get her sponsorship and enough funds. Now, I’m doing the same for other kids. It seems to get me by and, without it, I’m not sure I would be standing here today.”