Olympic Bronze Medal winning javelin thrower, Goldie Sayers, tells Marina about her Olympic ‘sliding doors’, life after the “big sport” and how Olympians keep in their physical condition.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• What you learn through doing competitive sport, and especially through competing at the top level, is completely transferrable to any other walk of life. For me, certainly, the mindset side of sport, it’s all the intangible things you learn, like putting days of consistent hard work together to reap rewards, having goals to work towards, and the ability to work hard  and be disciplined and self-motivated. I didn’t realise that my level of focus is relatively extreme!
• I always wanted to be a sportsperson, but I didn’t know that could be a career or that was even possible. I lived and loved sport as well as music from a young age, it was the thing that brought me alive and that I was most focussed on in school.
• You have to be a bit strange, odd or mad to become an Olympian. We’d train six days a week, 5-6 hours a day which, over the course of a year, is about 1700 hours of training. Each throw lasts about 4.5 seconds and, if you have a bad day at the Olympics qualifying, you can get knocked out after three throws – in four years you can have done around 7000 hours of training for a little over 13.5 seconds. If you were looking at that as a business case, it’s completely unsustainable!
• I bought a house very, very young and rented rooms to other athletes and that started my buy-to-let portfolio. I did a lot of speaking in schools alongside my sporting career as well. I hadn’t prepared for retirement from sport fully but, when I did retire, the sense of freedom was quite profound because my brain and mind had always been fully focussed on sport and, all of a sudden, I could focus on multiple things. I thought a lot about what I didn’t want to do more than what I wanted to do, because I already had the property portfolio and speaking and coaching in place.

BEST MOMENTS

‘I was lucky to have two parents both of whom did what they loved. The mantra at home for me was “do what you love or whatever makes you happy”, which is a lovely way to be brought up but could go two ways if you’re not particularly disciplined.’
‘If you enjoy doing something you’re going to work harder at it and get better results as a result of loving what you do.’
‘You don’t know what the Olympics is like because you’re so focussed on what you’re doing. You have to treat it like any other competition. The Olympics is so special because it brings so much joy to so many people and it’s so much bigger than just yourself.’
‘When I look back it wasn’t about medals, it was about mastery. I am competitive but winning wasn’t my main goal. The javelin is such a challenging event; you’re competing against the event.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Goldie Sayers is a former British javelin thrower, who won a bronze medal at the 2008 Summer Olympics. On 20 May 2007, Sayers set a British record in the javelin at 65.05 m (213 ft 5 in), becoming the first British woman to throw over 65 metres since javelins were redesigned in 1999, she improved on this by throwing 66.17m at the London Grand Prix Diamond League meeting in London in 2012.

On 7 August 2012, Sayers competed in the women's javelin at the 2012 Summer Olympics, but had sustained an injury to her right arm and was unable to feel her throwing hand. She threw three attempts but failed to throw the qualification distance and so stepped over the line and was knocked out of the competition without recording a mark.

Sayers subsequently had elbow surgery which involved a ligament being removed from her right wrist and inserted in her left arm. She lost her funding from UK Athletics at the end of 2014, but philanthropist Barrie Wells agreed to fund Sayers' training in exchange for helping heptathlete Katarina Johnson-Thompson improve her javelin throwing.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/goldiesayers

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goldiesayers

ABOUT THE PODCAST

Woman Self Made podcast brings you interviews with hugely successful women from all walks of life – world renowned business leaders, disruptive entrepreneurs, world class athletes, self-made multi-millionaires, entertainment and TV personalities. In these conversations we dive into their unique stories with an aim to deconstruct their secrets for success. We talk about their journeys, ups and down, while distilling along the way the habits, tools, tactics and tips, which you can learn and use.

So, grab your favourite drink and join us every Thursday for open conversations with the most inspiring women talking about building successful businesses, careers and living lives of their dreams.

ABOUT THE HOST

Marina Bennett had a high-flying international career in strategy and finance, and in 2019 she decided to leave her £300k/year City job to take entrepreneurial plunge from scratch. She is now a multiple business owner on the way to her first 7 figures. Marina is also a founder of Woman. Self-made. (@womanselfmade.inc) - an online community of confident, ambitious women who want to achieve success and live the lives of their dreams.