London 2012 Olympics: life after the Game, how athletes struggle to give up the day job

London 2012 Olympics: life after the Game, how athletes struggle to give up the day job
This was good news for performance directors, because it meant a wider pool of talent to choose from. But the people at UK Sport spotted a potential downside too. A lot more thirtysomethings would be involved in the London Olympics. And that meant a lot more awkward transitions to the real world in the autumn of 2012. Yes, the party might be epic, but it was threatening to come with a stinking hangover.

Here lie the origins of one of the least reported initiatives of the Olympics. It’s tempting to call it Project Civilian, because it is all about reintroducing athletes to the mundanity of life outside a high-performance centre. But it has never really had a name – just a budget, of some £3 million over four years, and a workforce of 22 life coaches. It is one thing to show a rower how to make the perfect catch, and quite another to help him find his place in the world once that oar has been shelved for good.

“We offer a very individual bespoke service,” Nick Slade, head of performance lifestyle at the English Institute of Sport, told The Daily Telegraph. “It’s about the athlete’s agenda. We’re here to support performance first and foremost. We wouldn’t be thanked by their coaches if we dragged them away to work on other things. But the research also suggests that if there is more to your identity than sport alone, that helps you make the transition into later life.

“Each sport is different,” Slade added. “In boxing one of the things we do is help everybody to earn a gym instructor’s certificate. If they are successful in the sport they could well go on to own their own gym.

“In hockey, there was a problem with retention of males in their mid-twenties. The players were seeing their peers driving around in fast cars and getting married while they were in debt, earning a pittance. So my colleagues looked to create a number of opportunities for them to work with companies like Cadburys, IHG and O2, whether on work experience or short-term contracts.”

Until recently, none of this vocational fine-tuning would have been necessary. Olympic competition was genuinely amateur. Athletes rarely had an option but to combine their training with a day job, unless they enjoyed the luxury of inherited wealth, or had built up their savings for a spell of pure competition until the money ran out.

All that began to change towards the end of the last century. Katherine Grainger, the hotly tipped sculler who opens her campaign today at Dorney Lake, was one of the first of the new breed, receiving funding almost from the point when she entered the rowing team in 1997.

“I was so lucky,” she says now. “A lot of the other girls had been in massive debt, and had to take out loans just to pay for petrol to cover the vast amounts of travel involved. There was a definite feeling of ‘If you want to do this, it will cost you’ so it wasn’t sustainable for long. But once the Lottery funding came in, everything turned to performance.”

The gains from Lottery funding have been enormous. Most obviously, Britain has surged up the medal table, with successive finishes of 36th, 10th, 10th, and fourth since the nadir of Atlanta in 1996. Financial support has also opened Olympic sport to a wider social demographic, even if David Cameron (of all people) still complains that privately educated athletes are over-represented within the British team.

But something has been lost, too, for the modern Olympian can become as narrow in his or her own way as any single-minded careerist. One of the movement’s original principles – that of balance, or mens sana in corpore sano, as the classicists would put it – is under threat. And that can be a disadvantage once your last lap has been run. Funding may have the potential to extend your sporting lifestyle, but it can also be a means of putting off the dreadful day of decision.

“It’s important to think about what comes next,” says Dr Tim Brabants, the sprint kayaker who will defend his K-1 1,000 title next week. “It’s one thing if you’re in athletics, where most Olympic medallists over the last several Games have been able to develop careers in TV or radio. Very few athletes in any other sport have that option.

“With our Lottery funding comes an opportunity. There’s support available for courses, and you have performance lifestyle advisers whose role is to help athletes develop a career outside their sport. Once I’d got a medical degree out of the way, it made training so much easier, because I always knew I had something I could go back to. Otherwise people can become quite distracted, worrying about what they’re going to do.”

OLYMPIC REFUSE COLLECTOR

Slade wryly admits that his department receives far less media attention than the sport scientists across the hall. If there is something militaristic in the Olympic arms race, with its wind tunnels and its blood tests, then the lifestyle advisers are wielding a form of soft power. They address the athletes’ hearts and minds, not just their cardiovascular systems.

Glamorous or not, theirs is an important role, because you don’t get to be faster, higher and stronger unless you have a solid foundation to work from.

Take Natasha Perdue, a weightlifter who will compete in the 69kg class on Wednesday. In 2009, Perdue relocated from Wales to the new high-performance centre in Yorkshire on the lowest level of lottery funding — just £100 per week. With a mortgage to pay, she couldn’t have managed without shifting her job as a refuse collector from Swansea Council to Leeds, which was considerably trickier than it sounds.

“My lifestyle adviser helped me get a career break from Swansea and a new role close to my training centre,” Perdue said. “I worked full-time up until five weeks before the Games. Then, once all this fuss and attention is over, it will be back to reality, back to Swansea, and back to running behind a lorry again, throwing rubbish on.”

Yet Perdue says she would not have it any other way. “I’m one of these personalities who is all or nothing. You’ve got to escape and have time off mentally and physically, and that’s why going in to work can be nice. The boys keep me real by teasing me. ‘Can you pick this bin up?’ they say.

‘It’s too heavy for me?’ And if I get to the point where I’m feeling sick of it all, I just ring Keith up and he comes around for a coffee.” The emotional support can be just as valuable, ultimately, as any hi-tech facility.

As someone who combines a day job with a demanding training schedule, Perdue is part of a minority within the British team. But there are others.

Brabants went back to the A&E Department of Nottingham City Hospital for 18 months after winning gold in Beijing. Grainger is on the verge of completing a law PhD on psychopathic murderers. “For me, the whole point of doing it is that it’s so different,” she says. “It’s about being able to leave the river, go to the library and shut yourself away.”

And then there is Abdul Buhari, the only member of the athletics squad who has maintained an external career in the build-up to London. A discus thrower who spends five days a week training at Loughborough and the other two in the offices of Credit Suisse in Canary Wharf, Buhari works as an investment banker. “The guys in the office initially found it very strange,” he says. “But I’m the type of person who needs a different stimulus. The discus is a very technical event: you can spend months working on a tiny part of the throw, so it’s useful for me to switch off and look at spreadsheets all day.”

THE PRICE OF SUCCESS

The likes of Buhari and Brabants could be seen as poster children for the benefits of a broader outlook. Yet Slade smiles at the idea that they might be representative of Team GB as a whole.

“It sounds very plausible, the suggestion that you can have these parallel lives which contribute to each other,” he says. “And sometimes it’s true: people like Tim and Katherine are incredibly single-minded, inspirational really. But there are plenty of others whose time is being squeezed by the way performance demands have ratcheted up over the years. A lot of people take the view that ‘I have to do this 100 per cent or I’ll live with regret’.

“It’s a challenge for us, because we’re getting to a level now where most of our athletes have only ever known training, have never had a job. And trading on success at the Olympics isn’t as easy as it used to be either: the more medals that Team GB win, the less visible each individual medallist becomes.”

Ideally, Slade hopes to help Olympians avoid the painful post-career comedowns that have become commonplace in established professional sports like cricket, football and rugby. But he knows that there is a limit to what can be achieved. His role is more about softening the fall than eliminating it altogether. Providing a parachute, if you will, through support that typically lasts for three to six months after retirement.

Finding a new path won’t be easy even for those best placed to do so. Just ask Grainger, one of the most poised, articulate and capable people you will ever meet. Now 36, she could walk into any number of interesting posts after these Games, from law to academia to sports management. And yet, she still admits that “I finds it hard to see what might fill the gap. When you have this passion, this drive, this motivation, you can’t imagine leading a normal life.”

Or talk to Buhari about going from a Diamond League meeting on a Sunday night to a 6am commute into the City of London the next morning. “One minute you have all this adrenalin and you feel really powerful – sometimes even invincible. Then you get on the train into the office, the Jubilee Line and you think, ‘Oh, I’ve gone from Superman to Clark Kent’.”

Among this group of athletes, Brabants seems the least concerned about the post-Olympic gearshift. “I love being in a hospital environment,” he says.

“It’s similar to sport because who you’re surrounded by specialists who are really good at what they do in lots of different areas. You can call on expertise from lots of different people and get things done really quickly.”

Is there an unexpected lesson here? Admittedly, you won’t find many workplaces with the sort of drama, excitement and constant stimulation that sport can offer. Nor indeed the opportunities for romance that are available, allegedly, within the athletes’ village. But if you were going to look for the best available approximation, a hospital casualty ward might be a sensible place to start.