The sad end
Top athletes and sportspeople can find it difficult to come to terms with the end of their career, writes Jane Bradley
It is Saturday morning. All over the country, right as you’re reading this, thousands of young people will be practising sport.
You may be a parent, grandparent or friend of one of the dedicated young sportsmen or women. You might have picked this up to help while away the time waiting for them in a leisure centre in Edinburgh, or Stirling, or Thurso – while your offspring completes lengths of the pool, swings in circles from a pair of gymnastics rings, or practices their double-handed backhand. You might be waiting by an ice rink in Dundee, watching sit spins and spirals or at the side of a rugby pitch in Melrose while your son or daughter launches themselves into a ruck.
While some of these young people are doing all of this entirely for fun or fitness, others will harbour dreams of a sporting career. A proportion of those will dedicate their childhood and teenage years to trying to get to the top of their profession, while an even smaller number will actually make it to competing at a high level. For the ones who do make it to the Olympic Games, it is all too easy to assume they have made it, reached their final goal.
Yet a first-person account from a retiring athlete made me think hard this week about the difficulties of what happens next. Most sports people – with some exceptions, showjumper John Whitaker is still contemplating the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, when he will be 64 – reach the pinnacle of their careers by their early 30s. The question is, then what?
In a week when retired sprinter Usain Bolt looks set to sign for an Australian football club, Edinburgh-based Team GB Olympic swimmer Lizzie Simmonds published a blog post about retiring from competitive swimming aged