It’s hard on the mind when you stop
The difficulty of retirement for an elite sportswoman lies not just in the physical side but the emotional test it poses. Jim White examines how best to live well after sport
In sport, retirement is often not a matter of choice. Frequently it happens at the very point a career seems to be taking off. Take Hannah Gallagher. Back in 2015, aged 24, Gallagher was flying as a rugby player. Recently turned professional, the back-row forward had 29 international caps and nursed ambition to notch up at least 50. Then, when training with the England squad ahead of a Six Nations encounter with Scotland, she snapped her cruciate ligament.
“It never crossed my mind that I would have to stop playing until I decided to stop,” she says. “So when I had the injury, I just thought: ‘I’ll be back’.”
For nine months she worked exhaustively on her fitness.
Then she made a return. But in her first outing with her club Saracens, she felt her knee go again.
“I feared the moment it happened it was over, but I told myself I could get back,” she says.
She could not. Her knee was shot. Eventually, after three further operations, she came to the conclusion her career was finished.
“I suffered massively when I retired,” she recalls. “I still thought of myself as a rugby player and I wasn’t any more. I remember people coming up to me a couple of years after my injury saying, ‘didn’t you used to play for England?’ And me going, ‘yeah, yeah I’m just injured at the moment’. I’m not sure who I was kidding.”
Gallagher was by no means unique. Very few sportswomen get to take a farewell tour, retiring financially insulated, fulfilled, without a backwards glance. Many find themselves suddenly stripped of income, point and purpose.
Goldie Sayers, the former Olympic javelin thrower, studied the phenomenon for her dissertation when completing a masters in Sports Science after she stepped back from competition in 2016.
“The physical side of retiring is the easy bit,” she says. “It’s the emotional side that’s hard. The biggest thing is identity. Sport is who you are. You get put on a pedestal that is not particularly helpful.
“The issue is, when you are engaged in elite sport – particularly full-time professional sport – you don’t get the opportunity to develop other identities.”
Even for the most successful sportswomen, finding a second purpose can be tough.
“It was difficult initially after I retired,” the gold-medal winning heptathlete Denise Lewis explained at an event in Windsor before lockdown. “You have the burning desire to be successful and that needs to go somewhere when you finish.
“When you are in a sport, there is a plan to reach for perfection in a certain week in August and it gives you a focus in life and in everything you do around it. It’s a strategic plan that is mapped out over several months and that plan is something I found hard to replace in my life.”
These days Lewis happily fits in work as a television pundit and president of Commonwealth Games England around looking after her four children.
And like Lewis, it took Gallagher some time to discover another plan. Eventually, after much trial and more error, she landed a position at Life After Professional Sport, an organisation dedicated to helping sports people into second careers.
It was there, as she advised some of LAPS’S 3,000 members on their next move, that she came to appreciate how much former athletes have to offer in the workplace.
“I can’t overstate how transferable their skills are,” she says. “I had worked in recruitment before I turned full-time and I was aware of what people looked for: leadership, teamwork, quick learners. Well, athletes have that and a lot more. There’s no doubt companies find it really great to have someone who has already been at the top. Athletes like to win and they work as hard as they can to make that happen. What a sales pitch that is.”
And retiring sportswomen need that pitch. Statistics suggest that 40 per cent of male footballers in the United States are bankrupt within three years of retirement. Believing that they have enough money never to need to work again, they quickly discover maintaining a lavish lifestyle once the sizeable flow of sporting income stops is impossible.
However, there is a reason there is no comparable statistic for women athletes: few make enough money from their sport that they need no further income. Most are obliged by financial circumstance to employ their skills elsewhere. Though Gallagher admits it is not always easy to find her clients the right position in which to exploit their abilities.
“A lot of athletes say they don’t want to sit at a desk nine to five, I hear that every day,” she says. “And money is not the be all and end all. What everyone wants to find is something as fulfilling as being in sport. I tell them, if you use what you learned in sport, you will find something. You have the very best apprenticeship for the world of work.”
Not that every skill honed in sport is helpful. Three years ago Gail Emms, who won a silver medal in badminton at the 2004 Olympics, found herself – after more than a decade of retirement – financially and emotionally adrift.
“I used to be the best in the world at something and suddenly, here I was no good at anything,” she recalls of a time when she was close to broke. “No one wanted me. And I’ve got this drive I can’t switch off, I want to be good at something, I want to achieve, I’ve got nowhere to put it.”
However, even as her finances sank, her natural inclination, honed after years in sport, was to pretend that nothing was awry. “A sports person trades in confidence,” she says. “You cannot show a hint of weakness. When I was struggling, I thought I needed to show outwardly everything was fine. That was counterproductive. My refusal to admit I was losing meant I couldn’t properly see a way through.”
It is, she suggests, a trait to which female athletes are particularly prone. “I would say it’s worse for women. You have been brought up to show not a chink of weakness. You have heard the sneers of, ‘oh she’s on her period’, so you double down. Vulnerability is not a word you ever want associated with you.”
When she was doing research for her masters, Sayers discovered Emms’s response to her problems was all too common. “Totally, that’s a major issue,” Sayers says. “As a sportswoman you’re trained to show no sign of weakness. But what you need when you retire is advice. You need to seek help through friends, through colleagues. You need a way to figure out why you are feeling anxious.”
Emms found her way forward by writing a blog. The response, including from many former Olympians, was extraordinary. “I found it so comforting just to talk to people,” she says. “That’s what I would say to anyone who was in my position: reach out and talk. I sometimes wonder if I’d been more prepared to seek emotional help when I was still involved in sport it might have made me a better badminton player.”
Sayers agrees that putting aside the protective carapace athletes adopt is fundamental to finding a successful role in retirement.
“I don’t think any athlete expects a new career put on a plate,” she says. “But what they might not initially realise is how much they will need to take advice and open up about what they want. My advice is, you can’t do it on your own.”
After putting down her javelin, Sayers herself has found significant point and purpose in developing a property investment company, as well as offering life coaching. “Would I employ a former sportswoman? Absolutely,” she says. “But first I would advise them, before they started, to ask themselves is this really the job they want to do?”