A SPORTING CHANCE

The recession has forced change on many professionals, but two former Olympians say that the corporate world can learn from their experiences.

WORDS BY TRICIA HOLLY

 
LEON TAYLOR / KAREN PICKERING

AT 10PM ON 14 AUGUST 2004, LEON TAYLOR stepped onto the podium in Athens and collected an Olympic silver medal for the men’s synchronised 10 metre platform dive. It was Britain’s first Olympic medal of the Athens Games and the nation’s first diving medal in four decades.

Four years later and Taylor was tipped to pick up gold in the Beijing Games when, just 80 days before the opening ceremony, doctors told him he could not compete. A lingering shoulder injury picked up over 22 years of hitting the water at speeds of up to 40mph (65km/hr) had ruled him out, and just like that, the 30-year-old Cheltenham-born athlete’s Olympic days were over. But, he says, he was lucky.

“I’d already started thinking about what else I could do when I was first injured in 2001. I was lucky I recovered and went on to compete and win a medal in Athens, but it was always in the back of my mind this wouldn’t last forever and that I needed to be prepared. Not everyone has that foresight and I know a lot of ex-athletes who feel totally lost after their sports careers are over.”

And with the cutbacks and redundancies that have spread through the corporate world, Taylor is seeing that same sense of shock and dislocation being experienced in the ‘civilian’ world. His retirement had come sooner than planned, but he realised that the mental skills he needed to hone his sporting abilities would have value in the real world. Taylor recalls the cruel training regimes he had to endure just to have a shot at an Olympic medal and the commitment and mental focus it took. “Even on my day off, I was never really off,” he recalls. “I missed a lot of weddings and birthdays.”

Already a mentor to Olympic hopefuls on Team Great Britain and a coach to retiring athletes through his work on the British Athletes Commission, translating his experience into life coaching seemed like a natural step. Today, just a year after his retirement, Taylor runs a successful motivational speaking company that advises blue-chip firms on the value of focus, patience and teamwork. “There are a lot of people who have lost their jobs and are going through exactly what I did when I realised I had to retire,” explains Taylor. And in the same way he had to cope with arriving at the Beijing Games as a BBC sports commentator rather than an Olympic hopeful, droves of ex-City workers are struggling with the idea of leaving behind high-flying finance careers for the humbler worlds of teaching and non-profit work.

According to Taylor it’s all about managing life change, and finding a way to be happy while adapting to new circumstances: “Even though I’m working more for the BBC and have my own company,” he says, “when someone asks me what I do, I still reply, ‘I used to dive for Great Britain’”.

This identity crisis is something former Olympic swimmer and gold medallist Karen Pickering knows a thing or two about. “I swam for my country for more years of my life than not when I retired aged 32, so that was my identity,” says Pickering. “My mates called me ‘fish’ – it was who I was and it was very difficult to let go of that identity… Many athletes don’t choose to end their careers – sometimes it’s just thrust on you in the same way the credit crunch has forced people into retirement or to look at a career change.

“In international sport, athletes can still play for a club, but you can’t do that for the Olympics – there’s no in-between. You might have a plan when you’re going to retire, but you might not.”

The biggest challenge, says Pickering, is when you’re doing something you’re proud of and it’s going well, and then it ends. “You might think, ‘am I ever going to be as good at something else as I am at this?’ That can be a difficult question to answer and it’s very scary.”

Like Taylor, Pickering also mentors retiring athletes to help them with the transition to normal life. “When you’re an athlete, all that matters is your sport, so when that’s gone it’s very easy to find reasons not to get out of bed in the morning.”

Pickering admits she spent about 18 months forcing herself to do mundane tasks just to give her day a purpose. “I set small goals every day. I didn’t know what I wanted to do after I retired from swimming, but I knew what I didn’t want to do, so I started there,” she says. Pickering now owns a chain of swimming schools. Her most recent venture aims to do for swimming what Jamie Oliver has done for school lunches by promoting the lifelong health benefits of swimming and making facilities and instruction accessible to children of all ages, from all backgrounds.

“The reason I couldn’t leave my identity as an Olympic swimmer behind is because that’s what I was most proud of, so I realised that I had to find something I could be equally as proud of and loved to do,” explains Pickering.

Although Taylor is still coming to terms with his new identity, he agrees that the only way to move on in life is to stay focused and to enjoy what you do. He refers to the period following his initial injury in 2001 as his ‘dark days’. “I learnt a lot from that experience, but what I learnt most was to smile and enjoy what you’re doing, because it’s the only way you’ll get through the ups and downs,” he says.

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