FUTURE IS NOT SO GOLDEN FOR GB HERO AMY

IN DECEMBER, the Australian Cricketers’ Association published the results of a survey about retirement. The ACA contacted every player who had left state or international cricket since 2005, and asked them how it had gone. They discovered that 39 per cent of ex-cricketers experienced initial high levels of stress and anxiety, while 25 per cent suffered depression or feelings of helplessness for longer. A significant number, 43 per cent, felt they lost their identity after finishing as a cricketer. A cross-sport survey in Britain by the Professional Players’ Federation recorded similar results. Focusing on the two-year period following retirement, it found 24 per cent of 1,199 sports people questioned had experienced mental problems, addiction, financial issues or ill health. Not every athlete retires with a multi-million-pound pension pot, John Terry’s house or a cushy number on BT Sport. Some must find work, having trained for nothing beyond competition for 20 years; others find it hard to accept reduced status or ability. And then there is Amy Williams Remember Amy? She won Great Britain’s only gold of the 2010 Winter Olympics. The first solo Olympic medal this country had collected at the event since Robin Cousins in 1980. Williams travelled fastest down Whistler Mountain on a bob skeleton run so unforgiving that it had already claimed the life of Georgian luge slider Nodar Kumaritashvili. She was interviewed by Clare Balding and was very excited about it. She posed, back home, in glamorous frocks and smiled until her face ached. And then she sort of disappeared. What Williams had not anticipated was that the morning after the Vancouver Games ended was also day one of the build-up to London 2012. Following an initial whirl of publicity, the public appetite was for anticipation, not history. ‘Everyone wanted London athletes,’ she told me, during a chance meeting. ‘They would rather have a potential bronze medallist from London, than a gold medallist from Vancouver. They still would.’ That wasn’t so much of a problem while Williams (left) was in competition; but, two years after winning gold, following multiple knee operations and three bulging discs, she quit. The same year the British public were enraptured by London, Williams retired, unnoticed. And it was a peculiar withdrawal, even by athletic standards, because the day Williams stepped away from her sport she gave it up for ever. There is no skeleton equivalent of sport’s second act. David Lloyd was still playing for Accrington Cricket Club at 61, Jack Nicklaus hit the ceremonial tee shot at the US Masters in 2013, Sir Trevor Brooking turned out for Sunday league team Havering Nalgo after retiring from the professional game. Yet Arthur, Williams’s sled, is in bits now, and there is no skeleton course in Britain to sate any need for speed. If Williams was German, she could turn up at the local run and get her kicks that way. Being British, she would have to make special provision with a foreign club, book flights, hotels and transport her equipment abroad. She says she cannot afford that. Still, if there is ever a month when a gold medallist winter Olympian is in demand it is this February. Williams will be in Sochi commentating for the BBC and has also been engaged by Ski Sunday. For a brief period, winter sport is news again. A gold medal is perceived as the beginning of an endless open-top bus parade of acclaim. It isn’t. These days Williams seems quite bitter that minor spats in football attract big headlines, while leaders in her sport toil in anonymity. Her friend Lizzy Yarnold may keep the skeleton gold medal in Britain yet, right now, could walk down any street here unnoticed. That may even be the case 12 months from now. Eddie Edwards, meanwhile, is back in demand. It is a short-lived and random beast, this life after sport.