SPORTS SPONSORSHIP has come a long way since plasterer-Michael Edwards raised the money to soar like an eagle on the ski jumps of Calgary.
Eddie the Eagle may have been Britain’s best-loved true amateur Olympian, but he certainly won’t be the last.
Soon after the Olympic flag comes down in Beijing this summer, Jonty Clarke, now training with the British Olympic hockey squad, will be back at his desk in Reading poring over the tax audits for one of Britain’s big firms and sweating over his next accountancy exams.
Win or lose in Beijing, kayaker Tim Brabants will be looking for his next residency as a junior doctor, fencer Jo Hutchison will go back to being an executive PA, and sharpshooter Steve Scott will be keeping his customers happy at B&Q, the DIY chain.
All four are living embodiments of the Olympic spirit, elite athletes who are at the peak of their sporting careers, yet who manage to hold down a job that would keep most of us happily glued to the sofa at the end of the working day.
Until last October Clarke, 27, was auditing business accounts from 9am to 5.15pm five days a week and fitting his training in before and after work. Now, with Beijing looming, he is behind his desk or visiting clients Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays and trains after work.
Clarke said: “I have a two-hour training session after work at Bisham Abbey [the national training centre 20 minutes away from his home in Reading], go running on Tuesday and have Wednesday off [off training, not off work], and train at Bisham with the rest of the hockey squad Thursday, Friday and Saturday.”
He is realistic about his career outside hockey, which he knows is not a sport he can rely on to provide him with an income for the rest of his life. “If you want to have a serious career as well as play hockey, you have to have an employer who lets you develop,” he said.
That does not mean the firm is short-changed, however. “By nature a lot of us who are elite athletes are quite ambitious, so we want to progress at work as well as at sport,” said Clarke.
Don Williams, head of markets at the accountancy firm BDO Stoy Hayward, one of the Sunday Times Best 100 Companies To Work For 2008, had no part in recruiting Clarke, but believes you can’t go wrong with an Olympian on your books. He should know – in 1992 he played for the hockey team that went to Barcelona and today is a partner in BDO Stoy Hayward.
The firm offers Clarke, who works in the Reading office, the flexibility and time off he needs to train. From the end of this month it has granted him four months’ unpaid leave so he can concentrate full time on his preparations for Beijing. Other than that, he is expected to pull his weight as an accountant, and that means putting in a full day’s work and study for his next round of accountancy exams.
The benefits of having a potential Olympian around are felt all over the firm, according to Williams. He said: “Some people may not be as driven as Jonty.
They might complain that combining work and study is not easy and getting in the way of their life. When that happens you can point to Jonty and say, ‘Well, he was up at five for training this morning and here he is working his socks off delivering great performance. He will be in the gym tonight and he has passed his exams – now how hard is your life exactly?”
Williams added that the skills needed to reach the top in sport are equally valuable at work. “You have to be good at setting objectives, be self-motivated, you perform well under pressure and you deliver great performance at all time. They also understand what ‘team’ means and all these things are transferable to a business environment.”
Elite athletes were also not known for throwing “sickies”, said Williams.
Most Olympians will not make their fortune from their sport. Brabants, 31, said: “I can’t make a living out of sprint kayaking. It’s not like being a footballer.” That is why, until recently, he was still putting in 12-hour shifts as a junior doctor in the accident and emergency department of Jersey General Hospital while training for his third Olympics. “It’s important to have a life outside your sport,” he said modestly, adding that he hopes one day to put something back into sport as a medic.
Brabants does concede, however, that working 12-hour shifts up to seven days a week does have an impact on his training as does the fact that Jersey, which has no rivers or lakes, is not the ideal spot for a kayaker.
What it lacks in facilities, however, is made up for by his boss. Carl Clinton is a consultant in emergency medicine and a competitive rower himself who once abandoned a race to tend a collapsed spectator. Clinton will happily accompany Brabants on his dawn training sessions.
He acknowledged Brabants’s dedication in combining his Olympic training with his 12-hour shifts in hospital, but added that the sportsman still had to pull his weight at work because a semidetached accident and emergency doctor was no use to anyone.
What some bosses contribute in motivation, others give in time. Sharpshooter Steve Scott, 23, representing England in the double trap, is training in Beijing with the England shooting team – something that would be impossible without the support of his employer, B&Q.
He took a low-paid job there doing the evening shift on the till and looking after customers, which enabled him to train during the day. No sooner had B&Q realised whom it had on its books than it enrolled him in the Olympic programme. The company now pays him a full-time wage for eight hours a week in its Bexhill store and has given him time off to go to Beijing.
“We have put together a sponsorship package for aspiring Olympians called Team B&Q whereby they benefit from full employment with part-time flexible hours, so that they can fit in their training and competitions,” said human-resources director Martyn Phillips.
“Team B&Q has several benefits for athletes as it provides the financial security of a full-time salary and the benefits associated with full employment,” he said. “It also provides the athletes with training and mentoring from established Olympic medallists and enables them to develop work skills that may help them once they retire from sport.”
Deloitte, the business consul-tancy, is another firm with a higher-than-average number of Olympians. It has 26 world-class athletes on its 11,000-strong UK payroll and Sharon Fraser, managing partner for talent, ranks them as one of her greatest assets. “We expect a lot from our people but we want them to be fulfilled in everything they do,” she said. “We do everything we can to help them achieve their goals because we want to have the best people working for us.”
That means investing in the long game by offering flexible working, sports bursaries and time off when needed. Its potential Olympians include Tyler O’Callaghan, a corporate-tax adviser, who is a European and world champion triathlete and one of half a dozen Deloitte employees with their sights set on the 2012 Olympics.
Fencer Jo Hutchison, 22, could not survive without her part-time job as a PA in London. Unlike Brabants, Clarke and O’Callaghan, who have committed themselves to a career, Hutchison wanted a job that paid the rent and enabled her to follow her sporting dream. She found it at the Construction Industry Council where she still works five afternoons a week while training every morning for Beijing, where she is competing in the sabre.
She said that if she had a normal 9-5 job she would be limited to training in the evening and that would not have been enough to win her a place in the England Olympic squad. “At present I am training from 9.30am to midday. Then I run home and shower and I’m in at work after lunch and work till 5.30pm. In the evening, I’m at the gym from 7 till 10. It’s tough, but it’s routine now. I can’t sleep in any more, I’ve forgotten how.”
Her boss, Graham Watts, the council’s chief executive, sees Hutchison as an asset rather than a liability and it is no coincidence that he is also performance director of British Fencing. But he stresses that Hutchison is no passenger – with two jobs to do, and at this stage in the Olympic calendar, he cannot afford a ditzy PA. “I can’t speak highly enough of Jo,” he said. “She has been training all morning but I have had six or seven e-mails from her already – she takes her laptop with her and in her down time catches up on work.
“If people have the discipline and the rigour to get to the top in whatever they are doing, you can be pretty certain they will bring the same discipline and rigour to their work, especially because they appreciate that they have been given an opportunity.”
