We talked about what he learned researching the book and what could be applied to a regular athlete’s training — a…

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For a lot of our members this book was one of their favorites that we’ve read because it was written in the style of a novel (though heavily reported non-fiction), which allowed a unique chance to really get to know two athletes you otherwise might not know much about and to follow their stories from small villages in Kenya, truly growing up running barefoot to and from school, to the complete culture shock of coming to a large four-year U.S. university.

And it’s always easier to follow and root for athletes once you know them!

Here’s the Q&A from our Book Club this past week.

How did you first meet Shadrack Kipchirchir and Elvin Kibet, and decide you wanted to tell their story?

I love this part, because there’s always a story within a story. I’m a long-distance runner. My last book was about a mountaineer, a badass female mountaineer, but this time I wanted to do a running story. And I was speaking with an Olympic historian, who mentioned the World Class Athlete Program, that’s part of the US Army. He was sort of describing the program and that there was a distance running component and the runners were based in Colorado Springs, and he said, ‘You’re a runner, this is really up your alley, you should look into it.’ 

Then I went to one of their workouts, in 2021, and they were getting ready for the U.S. Olympic Trials, and I met a bunch of the athletes, including Shadrack Kipchirchir. And he just started telling me his story, and I just got absorbed in his story and it sort of unraveled from there.

It took a long long time to sell the book. I have my theories, and of course one of them is that it’s the story of two Black Americans. Once I had a supportive publisher, I just knew that, as an author, I had to do the best I could and I didn’t want to sugarcoat anything, because there are so few opportunities, there just aren’t any books out there about Black American long-distance runners. I wanted to be as authentic as I could in telling their stories.

Once you met them and wanted to write a story about them, how do you report that? Did you go to Kenya, talk to their families — there was a lot of stuff from their childhoods, etc?

I go really deep when I write a book. From beginning to end, the whole thing took two-and-a-half years; the writing itself probably took about six months. I went back and forth to Colorado Springs more times than I can count, because that’s where the three athletes live, and just spent an enormous amount of time interviewing them. And interviewing their friends and families and teammates, their college coaches. That was mostly by Zoom.

And then I did go to Kenya and spent about three weeks on the ground with Shadrack. It was during one of his training blocks, so that was fantastic because I was able to meet all of the family members who still live there and travel to both of their villages, which was so instrumental. It really helped me write all of those Kenya scenes, what that looked like, smells, sounds, what people looked like. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do the book justice if I didn’t get to spent time in Kenya.

It’s interesting, on the one hand, it’s almost a stereotype at this point of ‘oh, in Kenya, they run to school barefoot,’ but that’s actually what they did.

That was one of the things I was kind of intrigued by, because I thought it was hyperbole, or just kind of an urban myth. And I think now it is the case that that doesn’t happen so much anymore because of technology, but you have to remember this was 10, 15 years ago, even 20 years, because they’re in their mid-30s now. 

At that point that really was what happened. They really did run back and forth to school, including back and forth at lunch, so every day they had 15, 20 miles on their legs, which is crazy.

Elvin and Shadrack talk about how they grew up in poverty and came here, but is there a sense that their story was unique in Kenya? Was that considered extreme poverty or was it more the norm?

Yeah, that’s a great question. That was very much the norm. What was out of the norm was that all the pieces fell in place for both Shadrack and Elvin to be in the right place at the right time in the right physical condition, to be at tracks with these American college coaches doing recruiting and be seen on the day they had a great race, and then off they go to the United States. So that part was a bit of luck. But in terms of their environment and how they grew up, that was totally normal and on some level still is to a certain extent. 

When you say it’s luck that makes it sound like there are a lot of people in Kenyan who are trying to do it and it doesn’t quite line up for them.

Yes, that is very true. I think a lot of Kenyan teenagers assume ‘If I’m just really good at running that’ll be my meal ticket.’ And for a lot of them it is. But for the majority of people who get to the U.S. there is a component of luck, and there also has to be a pretty high academic level. They have to be incredible students to get into American universities, because of course they’re not just coming to run, they’re coming to study. So there are a lot of factors in play.

I hadn’t thought as much about the academic element until I was reading the book, but I could see how that would be a factor.

Definitely. A lot of them actually start in community college because they can’t handle the academic rigor that United States’ universities require, but they’re these fantastic runners. So they come in on a two-year scholarship, and then they transfer into an American four-year school their last two years.

It was also fascinating the lack of running some of them did seriously before they were able to get scholarship. I feel like Elvin just put in three or six months, or something like that, of serious training. I can’t imagine that. Was she just really good, or does that happen more often than I realize?

I think a little bit of both. You’re right that she ran back and forth to school, so she did have miles on her legs, but she never considered that running, she just considered that a mode of transportation. So in terms of actually running competitively and trying to learn about pacing and eating, you’re right, it was really only a few months.

The thing I always come back to is that the longevity of her career has been amazing. When you look at American kids who started running when they’re 10 years old and then go through middle school and high school, and by the time they finish high school or college, certainly if they’ve run in college, they’re often kind of burned out. Whereas Elvin was really just starting when she was 19 years old, so I think that longevity piece has been important.

Is she still running? I couldn’t tell.

A little bit. She ran the U.S. Olympic Marathon Team Trials, and that was her last big race. Now she’s transitioning, I think, into nursing school and into running for fun. 

In the book, we got a lot more about her story, when she came over here and was trying to get her bearings in Arizona. And I hadn’t really thought, either, about how many things you wouldn’t know about — like central heating, ice water. In my head, I’m thinking ‘oh well there are phones and computers when I’ve been places where I didn’t know the people or language,’ but that wasn’t really the case as much for them. How did they kind of handle that amount of culture shock?

It was a lot. I think for Shadrack it was slightly easier because his brother was there, and kind of took him under his wing and that helped a ton. But when Elvin came, she was a duck out of water really for many months. And had great roommates and teammates, who kind of shepherded her along. And then Shadrack, of course, came into the picture about six months after she arrived and he was a big help. But it was a lot.

Was there a thing here where she was like ‘I just don’t get it, it just does not make sense to me?’

She really did not understand the eating thing and the food thing. She really didn’t understand why, when she came to the United States, and was with her team and they would go out to meals, why they wouldn’t just eat as much as they possibly could. Because she had come from a culture of scarcity, where food was really hard to get. And so when she was here and could eat anything she wanted, she did. She just ate everything, which was good to a certain extent because she was competing at this high level. And she watched her teammates eating salad, and she just didn’t understand that from a nutritional standpoint and from a pure opportunity standpoint. 

It was also interesting how the concept of institutionalized racism, the way it exists in the U.S., just wasn’t something they understood. I’m sure there are different groups of people that have similar biases in Kenya, but it’s not the same. And it’s hard to explain to somebody.

I talked a lot about that with Coach Li because the moment it really came up was that moment Elvin went out for a run and this little tiny four-year-old girl was using racist slurs and screaming at her, and she literally didn’t understand what that was. Her coach was the one who sort of had to say, ‘this is racism.’ 

And she needed a big explanation, then started from square one and took all of these classes in college to kind of understand for herself where this came from.

Does she feel, do they feel, like they have a better understanding of the U.S.? Now that they’ve decided to stay here and live here, and they’ve had to learn more about it that someone who necessarily grew up here, do they feel like they really understand the U.S. now?

I think they feel like they understand big important things, like racism, a lot better than those of us who have white skin and were born and raised in the U.S. I think that’s probably true.

I don’t know that they would say one country is better than the other. I get this question a lot: Where do they consider home and what is better. And that was one of the things I really wanted to focus on in the book that they came to the U.S. and their life isn’t dreaming and peachy, they really had to struggle. They had a wonderful life in Kenya, as you could see from the first part of the book, so it was really just a matter of exchanging one set of challenges, like poverty, for another set of challenges, like racism.

Why do you think they decided, after college, to stick with running and to stick with the U.S.?

A lot of their friends who came over here on running scholarships didn’t stay after college. In fact, Elvin’s brother, the instant he graduated college, was on a plane back to Kenya the next day. I think, though, they saw the opportunity that this country could provide, and knew they’d probably have more financial opportunity in terms of running if they stayed in the U.S. rather than going back to Kenya. They also both had families who were really pushing them to leave Kenya, and had siblings in other countries all over the world, so they kind of had a blueprint for what they did.

The Army World Class Athlete Program: I actually thought they were always good at running. I didn’t realize the distance running component was as new as it is. And now it does seem like it’s attracted a lot of runners who came from other countries and want to be a part of this program. Do you think that was the intention? How is it working now?

The World Class Athlete Program, itself, has been around for many decades. The distance running component really did only kind of bubble up and become prominent at that 2016 Olympic Trials. So 2014, ‘15, ‘16 is when it kind of exploded and that was because at that time there was a program in the Army fast tracked individuals who came into the Army with special language skills, and one of the languages was Swahili. So a lot of Kenyans could enter the program and get citizenship like in a matter of months. 

Then, they could also join the WCAP program, if they met the standards, and keep running. So it kind of met a lot of different needs.

I think, now, why it continues to attract a lot of foreign-born athletes — even though the special language skills program in the Army has been disbanded — is still because the path to citizenship is very enticing. I also think it’s very difficult for foreign-born athletes of color to get sponsors or get on teams, for better or worse. It’s harder for them, because of the color of their skin, to get sponsored.

And then, also, I do think a lot of them really do feel indebted to the United States and really do want to serve this country. That’s certainly why Shadrack joined in the first place, before he knew that running was an option and that the WCAP program was an option. He really did join to serve the United States. And then a lot of them stay after their four-year contracts are up.

Is he still running?

He finished his four-year contract with the Army in 2018, and then had a choice and took a contract with Nike through 2022. And now he’s running for Puma. He ran the Olympic Marathon Trials in February, but he’s not doing track right now because he’s moved onto the marathon.

I feel like part of the reason you were writing the book was to tell the stories of some of these runners. I know a lot of running fans have a hard time keeping the “Kenyan-born” runners straight and don’t know their stories. Which makes it harder to follow them.

That was part of the impetus in writing the book, because I wanted to showcase that there aren’t just “Kenyan-born” runners, because we hear that all the time and it drives them insane because they do love Kenya but they’re American. So having “Kenyan-born” next to their name forever makes them crazy.

I think it’s just we have a hard time distinguishing people of color. And they’re all tall and skinny. The first day I showed up at the track, that’s how I felt, I was trying to understand and keep track of who was who. And it’s just because my eyes and brain are not adjusted because I live in a community that’s full of white people.

Has the book helped get their story out? Have they had a response where more people now are like ‘Oh I know who you are, so now I can follow you?’

They have, especially Elvin, which has been great. Now the trick is to sustain it and to hope the media picks up on the incredible stories that aren’t being told. 

I was also looking at the list of world rankings recently, going into the Olympics, and it’s like ‘Kenya, Kenya, Kenya,’ 10 of the top 20 runners in the world are from Kenya. Do they feel a pressure with that? At home, are they just another fast runner? I can’t imagine being from a country where you’re that good at something and you’re doing that thing, but for a different country.

I don’t know, I’ve never asked them how that feels in terms of pressure when they go back to Kenya. I do know they’re celebrities when they go back, because they’ve “made it” in the United States, and they have money. So they’re sort of getting pulled in different directions and people want money from them, etc.

But I think, on some level, it’s also kind of nice because they’re able to blend in a bit more and join these big training groups where there are lots of runners who are at their level and they all look the same, so they’re not sticking out as much as they do here. 

I went to one of Shadrack’s long runs in Kenya, with him and one of his training groups, and it was just the most beautiful magnificent thing I’ve ever seen to have them out running on those dirt roads and they’re barely breathing and they just have these gorgeous strides. It’s impressive.

To talk about this news, I chatted with Colleen Bousman, who was the long-time race director and co-owner with her dad, Terry Davis, of Tri-California Events — which put on Wildflower, along with a handful of other well-known races in Northern California and also contracted to run the race management services for a number of events.

Colleen has now bought back the Wildflower assets from Motiv Sports and is running the events side of the business through her own production and race consulting company, See & Be Productions, which also race directs for other events (while her brother took over the traffic management business out of San Francisco).

Wildflower, which was at one point considered the “Woodstock of Triathlon”, had to deal with a modified course starting in 2014 after an extreme drought — combined with other challenges — led to low water levels in the lake. The race was canceled in 2017, came back in 2018 after an ownership stake was sold to Motiv Sports, and then was canceled in 2019. And then COVID.

You can hear more about the history of the race in Colleen’s interview with Bob Babbitt. We talk with her in the Q&A below about what happened with the race and what the plan is from here.

I was hoping you could kind of start by just telling us about how you’ve been doing this since you were 10, how your dad started Wildflower, and how it kind of grew over the years. Just because I don’t know that everyone knows how much it was run by a family.

Terry [Davis] and I, in the beginning, instead of me calling him ‘Dad’, even though it was a family business, it was always ‘Terry.’ A lot of it had to do with being a female in the sport as a race director and gaining enough clout so it wouldn’t be ‘Oh, he just gave his daughter the job.’

Because I actually grew up working Wildflower every single year. I started when I was a kid, he had all of us out there volunteering. My mom used to help manage the timing team, back when timing was literally handing out tongue depressors with numbers on them and you had little pace clocks. So it was all I ever knew. When it came time to go to college, my dad was teaching this Wildflower group at Cal Poly and I had been going with him for years to Cal Poly while he was teaching the class, so I was just going to Cal Poly, that’s what I knew and that’s what I was gonna do. No brainer. 

When I was there, I was on the water ski team, I think I needed something independent, but I still came back to the race. I went to work for a marketing company — at the time, action sports videos were really popular — and I just wanted to learn something outside of the family business.

Then we got the contract for Escape from Alcatraz. And my dad called me up and said I need to meet you for lunch. He’s like, ‘You need to come back, I need help doing this.’ From that point on, we started working together and race directing. I helped him in ’96 and ’97 was the first year I fully race directed. He and I have been side by side at all the events. My specialty was always race logistics, and his specialty was sponsorship and government agencies because he came out of the Monterey County Parks Department. 

That’s kind of the start of it. He was great at being the face of everything, and I loved being behind the scenes. For years, people didn’t even realized I was race directing, but I managed all the central command stuff, if there were medical incidents, the whole communications system.

How did the race grow? You mentioned the Alcatraz contract, and TriCal had four or five big races eventually and contracted with a ton of others. But it started with Wildflower. 

He worked for the Monterey County Parks Department and the event had just kind of stalled [by the early ‘90s], because there wasn’t a focus. It was kind of a Bluegrass festival that grew into something bigger and they didn’t know what to do with it at the time. So, in his negotiations with the park, he said he wanted to take Wildflower but they were gonna stay working together and the goal was to get the park ready for Memorial Day weekend and get people to come to the park earlier. They would still get that and he would run the event from then on.

And when you have somebody who their sole attention is Wildflower, and they love to do it, and he knew so many people, the event just grew and grew. Then he decided he was ready to start making it into a production company. He started working with Betsy on this charity event at Laguna Seca Raceway at the time. Then we got the contract for Alcatraz. You learn a lot from working with different businesses and organizations. We had a relationship with Team in Training through Wildflower, and they came to him and wanted to put on a charity event, a women’s marathon. 

Nike Women’s Marathon, we managed that race from year two until it was finished, I think it was 12 years. That was another one we learned a lot from, because it was 100% brand focused, everything they did was about the brand and the experience. The budgets they had were over the top, because it wasn’t an event meant to make money, it was all coming out of their marketing budget and they were so innovative. Every year, I had to basically throw away my binder, because they didn’t want any race to ever be the same. 

What were some of the things that really made Wildflower what it was?

I think we legitimized the entire festival aspect of things; it’s not just triathletes driving down, doing the race, and leaving. When you come to Wildflower, you have that weekend set aside and you’re here to stay. You’re not rushing back to a kid’s soccer game or lunch date. There’s a certain amount of decompression that happens.

I think the tri clubs was another one. The fact that they created their own little groups and campgrounds and activities, their own training programs and t-shirts. There was a whole thing that was created through the tri clubs.

The energy the college students brought, too, was fun.

In 2018, we also were able to get rid of a couple hurdles and had all of these glamping options, for the people who don’t really like to camp on their hardest race weekend of the year. We made it really easy to come in and pitch a tent or bring your RV or rent an RV or rent a complete glamping set-up. There was something for everybody.

When I first went to Wildflower it was huge, there was the giant Team in Training Tent, all the college kids. And then, over the years, it did start to feel smaller. When did that really start? Was it with the water and drought issues causing some of the uncertainties?

It happened a bit before that. The numbers went down a little bit when the economy went down. That’s when we saw our first little dip in numbers. I think the people who understood it was a whole vacation, those people who had been doing it for years, they kept coming. But we started getting fewer newbies. 

But we had started to build back up again. Right as we got momentum again, after the economy picked back up, that’s when the water issues hit. That took the numbers down a bit. We also started to evaluate, you get to a point where 36,000 people isn’t making you more money than 20,000 people because of the cost of infrastructure you have to put in, and the experience gets deteriorated. We started trying to balance out that we were getting the right number of people through the gate.

What was it at the peak?

We had almost 36,000 people through the game. It was just over 9,000 registered athletes. It was almost a 4:1 ratio of people coming to hang out v. race. That’s when we realized we need to find a way to bring all those people a race that matches with them. That’s why in 2018 we bought in the 5K, the yoga, paddle boarding.

Do you want to explain a little bit what happened with the race. It was a drought in 2014-15, but there have been droughts before.

Prior to the drought you’re talking about [in 2014], the only experience we had had in 35 years with a drought affecting our race was in 1991 and we were still able to do the race.

A couple of things happened this time. We had the drought, but they also had to lower the water level in the lake way way down in order to do some dam maintenance. Then the water that was supposed to come and fill it back up never came.  And then we got rain, but it came so hard and fast they had to protect the dam by letting some out — and they let it out too fast and all of a sudden the water dropped. There’s all kinds of speculation about what happened, rumors it was a calculation error, that the fisheries talked farmers into things, that there were a bunch of politics. We’ll never know, but it was unprecedented. Just two or three things that compounded.

How much of a problem did that cause?

We lost six-figures each of the drought years.

Because participation went down. When you have this traditional event, people get concerned if things change, they don’t know if they’re going to like it. That year we moved the swim and Heather Jackson actually said she liked it better, it was fun. Jesse Thomas was the same way. I don’t think it was a diminished experience, but there was a lot of added expense for us, too. We had to bus everybody to the other side of the lake, our operating expenses literally doubled.

The park has a concessionaire that runs the restaurant, the dock, the cabins, the store. When there’s not enough people coming to the park, they don’t open those things. So the concessionaire wasn’t there and the park employees weren’t there — because that’s all based on the number of people coming through the gate. The park was still open during that time, but not a lot. So we had to hire more sheriffs, more security. 

Then in 2018, the park was gated close, so that’s when I had to go in there and, literally, we were doing all the weeding, the mowing, the janitorial. I was cleaning restrooms myself. The cabins hadn’t been open. My husband was taking out the floors and putting in new floors in the cabins. Thank goodness he owns a construction company. We brought in street sweepers and my son was driving one of those big one. 

I don’t know how we did it, but it was fun.

And this all just compounded and then you had COVID?

We were fortunate that we had title sponsors every year and that really helps. Events don’t make a ton of money. You don’t see a ton of rich people out there who are event directors. Most of us have other side jobs as well. So yes, when we had those hits back-to-back: We had just built back up from the recession when the drought hit. We were back up to 27-30K through the gate. Then the drought hit and we were still sustaining at that point, but we knew that if we were going to continue to have water issues then we’d have to come up with an alternative plan — whether it’d be another venue.

That was our initial desire to hook up with Motiv Sports.

I was going to ask you about that. [Ed note: Wildflower was sold to Motiv in 2017.]

People probably thought ‘Oh, they sold to Motiv.’ But really the biggest thing for us was the long-term. We felt like we could team up with somebody who had sold us on the idea of expanding Wildflower to other venues. Then we wouldn’t be so dependent on water issues in one location. The brand was sustainable enough that when we were originally talking to them we were talking about doing Wildflower Europe, Australia, one on the East Coast. That would have added to a portfolio that would have made the business more sustainable.

We honestly believed it was the best for the business and we still had enough ownership that we could get it back. Unfortunately, what happened is the guy who had sold us on this whole vision, who we were very close with, left the company a month after we partnered. Your business really follows your leadership and the leadership was no longer there. And the new leadership was really counting coins. None of the visions were put into action with all of these races that had partnered with Motiv, and they were really scrambling.

And that also led to the last cancellation?

Yeah, 2019, we were on track to do just fine. And a decision was made that we were notified of over email that the race was being canceled. For us, integrity was really important, so to just cancel the race like that — with all the clubs we had verbally committed with — and that was when we knew we needed to get our race back.

Then, COVID happened.

Right, we did get our race back. I did an announcement on Facebook. We’re all excited. And literally a couple months later, COVID happened. 

I don’t think people understood how hugely that impacted events. We’re all independent contractors. We’re not making a ton of money to begin with. Events are the last thing to come back and no stimulus package. All of us had to go get other forms of employment during that time. 

I never thought I was going to go through what I went through with Motiv, with personal issues, my health. I got COVID four times, I had long COVID, now it’s a heart issue. That’s not the kind of stuff you share on social media. 

But the event did not sit dormant in the background. I always knew I wanted to bring it back but I was struggling with: Is this viable? Do people love it enough to bring it back or have things changed? Is there even still a place for Wildflower in the modern market? I had a really hard look at that. 

I never felt that we just needed to be a triathlon. I always considered it an endurance weekend, so I was always looking in the background at what other sports are endurance and encompass that same target market. How could I integrate those into Wildflower? So I’ve been doing that behind the scenes for three years now.

And what was your conclusion? Is there a spot in the market?

There is! There are also one, if not two, large other sports we will be bringing into the event in 2025. 

What are the obstacles between now and Wildflower 2025?

We’re already working with the park on the permit. They’re not obstacles, but just whether I’m going to be able to do all these things at once. I know there’s gonna be water next year, because I know the release schedule and I have that, but I need to get a comfort level that there’s going to be water long-term. So I wouldn’t say that’s an obstacle for the 2025 event, but it’s just a question of if it’s going to be a single-year event that we get everybody to come to because it may be the only time it happens or whether we’re able to figure out how to evolve the event, which is what I’m working on, so it’s not so water-dependent.

It’s building everything back up. We had this feeder program that once you graduated and were on the team with us at Cal Poly, then they’d come on as volunteer staff at our other events. They would volunteer for us first and later on, sometimes, we’d contract them and pay them for the weekend, and they’d do higher level jobs. That’s how we created this pool of independent contractors. But it’s been four years, there’s not a single student at Cal Poly right now who has ever experienced Wildflower.

And then sponsorship. You try to sustain your events on sponsorship dollars, and you earn your revenues and profits on your race entries. 

In 2018, we had a goal of 5,000 athletes. In our budgeting, the magic number was 4,000 registered. Could you do with with closer to 2,500-3,000 and bring in a larger sponsor, or another kind of race?

That’s another challenge now: Events are all vying for those same athletes who used to do six to eight triathlons/year, and now they’re doing two to three tris, a running race, a gravel event, and something else. So your pool of participants is a lot harder. What is the balance between the number of triathletes we bring in v. adding another large-scale endurance event to the weekend? I’m sure you can guess what some of those sports we’re considering adding would be.

Is there a plan to bring back TriCal’s other races too?

San Francisco became too expensive and difficult. And there are so few events there, we don’t need to be on top of each other. We need to be working together, sharing databases with each other — your event’s is in the spring, mine is in the fall, let’s work together. We had already started refocusing our efforts on doing fewer events really well. That way we can all thrive. 

Pacific Grove, the city was fantastic to work with, and it’s in Terry’s backyard. If I had one other event to bring back, that would be it.

It’ll be interesting to see how the market all shakes out here in California.

I would like to be in the business of putting on endurance events and festivals, rather than just triathlons. For the person who’s doing six races in the year, just different types of stuff, if you have more things to offer then they can do more of your things.

I think, unfortunately, the endurance industry went through a lot of sales of events to financial companies that when things don’t financially make sense they just sold them off or closed them down. It shrunk the market. 

This is a family business. I’m getting my daughter involved, she’s helping me out with some of the marketing stuff. I would like to bring in the success of 2018, but with some additions and evolving as far as what’s offered, the sports offered, the distances, but the management and the heart behind it is going to be the same. 

Author Kate Fagan talked to us about her reporting an…

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But with the amount of money being made in college football and, to a degree, college basketball, the business around those sports has become disconnected from a traditional student-athlete model.

“If you’re a computer engineering major and you develop an amazing app and you sell it to a company, or if Intel wants to pay for your tuition because they want to hire you after graduation, the university would probably be putting that out in its PR channels,” said Victoria Jackson, a sports historian at ASU, former DI runner, and considered one of the leading experts on the college sports landscape.

But not in sports.

A decade ago, Ed O’Bannon saw his image being used in EA’s college basketball video games — years after he’d played and having never received any compensation for it — and sued. He won. And what has followed is a spate of lawsuits from student-athletes arguing that schools and businesses can’t make these escalating amounts of money off of them. This has brought us to where we are now — with new suits and rulings virtually every week. And the system is now undergoing a massive overhaul in front of our eyes.

What does it look like when the dust settles?

Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) - Allows student-athletes to sign endorsements and sponsorship deals with third-parties and still maintain their “amateur” NCAA status — with still a lot of regulations and compliance rules

Transfer Portal - In 2018, the NCAA also launched a “transfer portal” to allow students to transfer and change schools — with regulations and compliance rules — and not lose their eligibility

Collectives - One outcome has been that groups (or “collectives”) of boosters have formed to “sponsor” athletes to transfer or come to their schools

None of this is inherently good or bad. But it is the outcome of the tensions inherent in our U.S. system. And it’s clear that system is not going to be able to hold those tensions much longer without fundamental change.

What happens from here? Does the U.S. need a federal sports office, like other countries? Do we need to spinoff the huge business of college football and basketball from an academic setting? How do Olympic sports adapt and adjust in this landscape?

We talked with Victoria Jackson, an expert who has testified in front of Congress on this topic and a former pro runner who ran in college with big names like Shalane Flanagan and Des Linden, about these questions and how we got here.

First off, what is a sports historian?

It was not a thing when I was an undergrad. Yeah, there might be sports in some of the classes I took in history and good people doing good work, but there were not classes being offered on sports history.

I had the good fortune to trip and stumble my way into finding it. I was getting a PhD in history and running seriously as a PhD student and then professionally—which gave me time racing and traveling and stepping outside of the U.S. system. And I realized I could be talking about all the thing I want to talk about in a history classroom through the lens of sports. It opens so many more doors to understanding a concept when you take a sports approach: systems of privilege and power and inequality and the human experience, all of these things.

My primary research field is college sports, and I also do a lot on global women’s sports, which inevitably intersects with American college sports and athlete activism. 

Do you ever look back on your time running in college and think of differently now?

It’s interesting, because I was talking with Jeremy Bloom about this. He was a football player at Colorado in the early 2000s and was also an Olympic skier. And because he had to take endorsement money to fund his travel and training as a downhill skier, it ruled him ineligible to play football at Colorado. At the time there was no legal recourse — like these are the rules and that’s that. 

He went on to play in the NFL, he was a very good football player. But the way he subsidized being able to stay in Olympic sport was through those endorsement deals.

And talking to him, you know, competing in the early 2000s there were still these markings of efforts to try to keep college sports “scholastic.” But obviously they were growing the business so dramatically at the same time that there’s all these conflicting messages that were happening. I remember it seemed really strange when students would fly across country to compete at Standard, at this one big meet to hit times. Like, why’s NC State here? No hate, my sister ran at NC State — but they were racing at 2 or 3 a.m. their time, Eastern Time, and then flying back, just so they could hit these times. How is that scholastic?

And how are we paying for all of this? It was the growth of football money.

After the early 2000s, college football basically became such a large business that it essentially funded other sports. Because you can’t pay the players, you have to spend that money and you have to have these markings of being “scholastic,” so you can’t outright professionalize the football program. So the wealth transfer from football to other sports really starts to increase to the point where five years before the pandemic the coaches of non-revenue sports in Division I, their pay increased by 43% across a 5-year period. And those sports weren’t bringing in 43% more money. Football was bringing in considerably more money because of the college football playoffs and the media right deals that conferences were negotiating.

As far as the infrastructure, across athletic departments, this is the best U23 sports development ecosystem in the world — that’s why we see so many international athletes coming through the NCAA.

What you’re kind of hinting at, though, is that it’s not actually a sports development system. It’s a college educational system. Nominally, you’re there to study.

Football — and basketball is kind of in its own category — these NCAA policies were never designed for those sports and those athletes. We’ve never asked: What is the mission? How are we building this? Who are we serving and how are we serving them?

The athletic department is pursuing football money and winning in football, and then all other sports follow that main desire of making money and winning in football. And when I say making money I mean spending money—because the business model here is to spend. It’s to bring more money in that you can spend to win. It’s this arms race, because there are no caps on anything and no agreed upon limits.

I get the sense that the excessive grown you’re talking about is what kind of led people to: Wait, the players should be paid. And that’s how we got NIL and the transfer portal and some of these different rules.

There’s this public conversation happening now about how athletes wanting to be paid, wanting to be employees or revenue share, is ruining college sports. But it’s really placing the blame with the wrong people, because you can not professionalize a thing and run it like a business and then say, ‘Wait, amateurism, education.’

The world got rid of this amateur ideology in the late-80s. Football is the reason why college sports didn’t follow then what the world was doing.

But if you spend even just a week during the fall with a big-time college football program, that is not an educational program that is serving those students. Part of debunking the lie of amateurism of the past 20 years has been showing all of the academic fraud taking place and the watered down educational experiences of athletes in those sports.

We should, instead, be rethinking or taking a re-look at what education means when you’re a football player in the 21st Century. There are a number of scholars who’ve tried to show all of the learning that happens in football, why don’t we have a football major? Or a reduced course load in the fall and slowed down educational timelines?

And, you can’t ignore the racial dynamics of big-time college sports. It’s no coincidence that the big-time sports programs that bring in the most money and haven’t reformed their compensation arrangements or labor relations, that the rosters of those teams are disproportionately Black.

When the schools and conferences go to Congress to try and get anti-trust exemptions to say athletes can’t be employees or can’t be paid directly — though I think they understand revenue sharing seems to be more and more of a likelihood coming — what’s interesting is I’ve never heard one of these people say we need antitrust protection to place a cap on coaches’ compensation or to reduce the spending that’s gotten out of control or to put guardrails on the distances teams will have to travel in these coast-to-coast mega-conferences. The fact that higher ed leaders aren’t asking Congress for those things really shows a disconnect and a disingenuity.

Where are things at right now?

There were a couple of high-profile cases where the NCAA ruled ineligible athletes, related to the transfer portal and the pandemic — because they’re making up the rules as they go. There was a University of North Carolina player who was trying to get back closer to home for family reasons and was ruled ineligible because the rules had changed. And it wasn’t just higher ed leaders who were outraged, it was politicians and attorneys general, who then sued.

The NCAA tried to get a court to say these rules will stay in place until these cases are completed, but the judge said no. So now there are no rules.

I will say I didn’t realize until last year how crazy things had gotten with the transfer portal and collectives. I think it took some people by surprise.

No, I think you're right. I think those of us who understood this business model to be fundamentally flawed and harmful knew exactly where that was headed. Those who see this is a great way of running a sports industry in the space of higher education were like, ‘oh no!’

Because the interesting and very predictable thing that happened was boosters seeing this as an opportunity to pay top athletes, primarily in football and to a lesser extent in basketball, and some really high-profile athletes in other sports. And this was the thing that wasn’t supposed to happen: boosters meddling with the recruitment of athletes or tampering with current athletes at other schools to try and lure them away. 

Now, think: If only there were a business model that existed in the world to prevent this from happening. And that’s professionalizing college football, right? You’d have contracts and agents; you’d have a players’ association and agreed upon restrictions on actions.

The disintegration of the Pac12 and the conference realignments, was this also an outcome of these NIL deals and athletes being paid?

No, this was conference commissioners and the media people who want to maximize their money in football. And the market expansion is part of that. So the Big 10 wanting the L.A. schools for the L.A. market and showing they’re the premier college sports conference — we could say “league” instead of “conference.” To optimize and maximize their media rights, when the Big 10’s media rights deal was up for renegotiation, they got USC and UCLA.

And the other piece is the expansion of the college football playoff. The money basically doubles annually in expanding the playoff and selling the media rights for that. The big conferences all get an automatic payment every year that comes out of that playoff media rights deal and then you get more money based on how many of your conference schools qualify and how far they advance — but that money goes to the conference and the conference shares it across the schools.

I don’t know if taking out one of the Power 5 conferences was the goal at the end of the day, but they should have predicted the domino effect. 

OK, so college football is this massive business that has funded all these Olympic and women’s sports development pipelines. So then how do you separate those things out? How do you get football players compensated and maintain a system of Olympic development for runners and swimmers? A lot of critiques — whether in good faith or not — have argued that if college football players are designated as employees, then it’ll bankrupt the entire system and other sports will be cut.

I think the first step is to say that no athletes are to blame here. It’s really important to remind athletes that their sports have value and they’ve been neglected historically by these people, who have been so fixated on the business of college football. 

Those athletes have also been used as a kind of shield to defend the enterprise: If we pay football players, women’s sports will die, Olympic sports will die.

And, to me, that’s lazy. It’s super lazy thinking and it almost excuses the people most responsible for designing new approaches. Then they can say: We don’t have to fix it, we can just blame them and then say ‘we told you so’ after schools start cutting sports. 

I realize I am a beneficiary of college sports. I had a world-class academic and athletic experience. The system served me. And I didn’t know that football players, who were disproportionately Black, were being channeled into fake classes at the same time that I was there falling in love with history. So I’ve felt responsible to show this problematic relationship and also to come up with solutions.

We need new revenue streams for Olympic sports. We need a different approach to thinking about what sports are in higher education. We need to expand participation opportunities rather than restrict them.

There’s this massive disruption conversation happening, and the USOPC (U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee) is currently going through a redesign right now as well. Congress created an independent commission on the state of U.S. Olympic and Paralympic sports and they’ve been at work over the last year-and-a-half. [Ed note: You can read their full report and recommendations here.] And they took this as an opportunity to show Congress we really need to rethink the Amateur Sports Act of 1978. That Act gave the USOPC a dual mandate to serve both the top of the pyramid and also that grassroots base — but they never had the resources or power to actually support the grassroots. So who in the world claims a mission of serving the greater public and taking on complex challenges and innovating for the future? It’s higher education.

I’ve been trying to show leaders of higher education you have a responsibility to get in line with what’s happening with the USOPC, to think in a sport-by-sport manner. What can we do as colleges with this best-in-the-world infrastructure to support Olympic and Paralympic development? How do we engage our community as participants rather than just as spectators? How can we have mixed public and private funding of facilities with a shared use approach, which even potentially makes them revenue generating and self-sustaining?

If you could wave your magic wand and come up with a solution?

There’s a lot of different revenue streams, a totally different model that needs to be developed. Football needs to be separate. I think it would be totally cool and probably ideal to spin-off football and make it independent of the university, but they’re paying to use facilities and university logos, they’re still playing in the same stadium. And those athletes have scholarships as part of their compensation packages that they can activate at any moment they want, maybe when they retire at 25. And then you don’t have to worry about things like Title IX, because if higher ed wants to run a professional football program in-house you have to provide equitable opportunities for women or professionalize in a similar way. And then gender equity could be approached in a sport-by-sport way.

Talk to people from other countries, anytime you’ve had a conversation about college sports outside of the U.S., people who are less familiar with the scale and business of our system, it’s jaw-dropping. 

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While they may be best known for the annual rider survey they publish, which makes widely known the issues these athletes deal with, TCA also does a number of other things and advocates behind the scenes for female riders. We talked about what it means to be a recognized union v. an association, why the UCI won’t recognize them right now, how they’re able to work on key issues anyway, and what those issues are for female cyclists as opposed to the male riders. That includes things like the collapse of high-profile teams and how to deal with contracts, equipment, insurance, salaries, and races that never materialize.

Iris was, herself, a professional rider for 12 years and won the national road race title in the Netherlands in 2014.

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First off, I don’t know that a lot of our readers really know any of the history. I’m hoping you can start by just telling us how The Cyclists’ Alliance (TCA) got started. You guys previously were part of the UCI.

So, historically there’s been no women’s union or union that represents the female athletes within professional cycling. There’s been a traditional men’s road union called the CPA, but they didn’t represent women at the time that I was racing from 2004 until 2016.

During the last phase of my career I was elected as a rider-representative on the UCI Riders Athletes Council, to represent women cyclists. You’re then in a few different commissions too, like the road commission, where I represented men and women. And I thought, ‘Great!’ Now, my peers elected me, but how do I actually communicate with them? There are very important topics that we discuss here, but I don’t actually know how they all feel about these things. So I just thought it would be better if I would be able to talk to them and be more prepared. For me, I really felt that I was sharing the voice of the peloton and not just my own opinion. 

That was one thing and, another, I also had some struggles in my career—with team managers, for example—and I realized that there wasn’t anyone you could go to for help. I’ve always lived on a very small salary, even when I was on really good teams. So you, as a rider, don’t have the financial capacity to hire a lawyer whenever you’re in it with your team manager about something small. I never had an agent or someone looking at my contract, all these kinds of things. 

That’s when I thought: ‘It’s kind of weird, there’s a group representing male cyclists, but not actually female cyclists.’

And the last thing that was really important was that, especially for those last few years I was racing in 2015 and 2016, a lot happened in women’s cycling. For example, the UCI announced the introduction of the women’s World Tour. And, at that time, I was also on the women’s road commission. We were talking about salaries and other things that would be put in place. And, again, I thought, ‘It’s strange that the sport is progressing, things are changing, but the main people—the athletes—they don’t have a united voice in this.’

For me, those were the three most important things in my own experience: the lack of influence, the fact that there was nobody representing women cyclists, and the progress of the sport.

Why couldn’t the CPA represent female athletes? It’s supposed to represent all the riders, right? So why wasn’t that sufficient?

At the time, I had some discussions with the CPA and their opinion was like: Well, if the women don’t earn a salary and if they miss certain things, like insurance and certain levels of contract, then we don’t consider them professionals and therefore we don’t represent them.

That was their opinion. I do need to say the CPA was, at that time and maybe still is a little bit, a dinosaur organization with a lot of old school cyclists.

The second thing: I also felt it was not a nice environment to be in as a female, to be a part of those meetings, for example.

And the whole system, the structure of the CPA, is that it’s a union of unions. It’s an international union and their members are actually the national unions: the French union, the Spanish union, the Italian union. At the time, they had eight members and I think now they have five. As a rider, sometimes you’re a member of that national union, sometimes your country doesn’t have a national union, and sometimes you’re sort of an automatic member of the national union (which is legally also not allowed). So it’s a very indirect system and it’s really hard, as a rider, to have direct influence. I also thought that was really weird that as a rider you don’t have direct membership, but all riders do pay the CPA because they take a part of everyone’s prize money.

This system, to me, was really broken. We thought, first of all, we want to make our own organization because we have our own issues. We want to be taken seriously. And it needs to be a future-proof organization, not with such an old-fashioned set-up.

So when did you all start the TCA? And how is it structured: Is it officially a union or more like an association?

We’re registered as an association. But our structure is that every UCI female rider in every discipline, basically from 18 years old on, can become a member. They can just subscribe at our website. Generally, these are riders who are part of UCI Continental or World Tour teams, or they’re racing internationally in track, mountain biking, or some other discipline. We have a board, which decides on strategy, and the board is elected by the members. We work with three-year terms on the board. And then we have a rider council, which is also elected by the members and consists of 11 riders across different disciplines and levels of the sport—we also try to have it as globally diverse as possible to get as much information from the different corners of the world. The President of the Rider Council is Ellen van Dijk and she, with Leah Kirchmann, also sit on the TCA board.

With the TCA board we really try to have a group of people that have certain expertise, legal or commercial, and then the rider-representative part. And then we have a team with all different skills sets—like we have two legal staff members, we have our executive director, Jean-François Reymond, who has worked for different player unions before.

How are you funded? Is it dues?

The dues are €50 a year, and they get free legal services, they can be a part of our mentor program, we have a nutritionist, an independent medical advisors. We have a duty of care framework, so we have different educational webinars. That’s basically the benefits they get as riders. I know it’s not a big deal, but for it is for some riders, who already earn no salary. Of course, it’s not enough, we can do more.

The first four years we worked on a budget of maybe €6,000 a year. The last few years, we have some funding, most from industry partners. For example, Strava is currently a big sponsor. We have Zwift and some other partners. Some of these are linked to a dedicated program and that makes it a little bit easier for them, because they can give workshops, have access to riders who are retiring out of the sport and can offer work experience. (There’s also, in the cycling industry, a lack of women, so in that way it’s also a bit of a win for them.)

But, I do see us as a union, because we represent the female peloton.

Here in the U.S., I’m used to unions negotiating and representing, like, a contract with an employer. Do you all do that?

Not yet. I should say, what we do at this moment is more advocating for change. Thanks to a yearly survey we’ve done since the beginning, we get a lot of data on the economic situation of riders, their salaries, their education, reasons why they leave the sport, safety. And with the results of that we can go to the UCI, we can go to teams, and we can say, ‘The problem is here, or here; this is where we should work on things, etc.’ Thanks to those hard figures, we’ve been able to advocate for minimum salary, and at the World Tour level for maternity leave, for example, for an improved ethics procedure and some other things.

Because we are not officially recognized by the UCI, we are not a party at the table like the CPA is. On the one hand, that’s a little bit annoying because it is difficult for riders to understand the whole system and to see the differences between the different organizations. On the other hand, though, of course we do get quite a lot of things done through working directly with UCI staff members.

At this moment, there is no collective bargaining agreement for women in cycling. There are just regulations put in place by the UCI—thanks to us advocating for them. Yes, it would be amazing if we could negotiate a collective bargaining agreement for the riders and we believe we can do that, even without being recognized by the UCI; it’s all about being recognized by the teams. 

But I do think it’s kind of strange that the UCI says, ‘OK, we recognize you because you represent a big part of the peloton, but we don’t want to sit with you at the table because there’s already a union and, secondly, we fund that union and we don’t want to fund two unions.’ And even if I say that we don’t want your money, because that makes us dependent on the UCI and that’s not something that is really favorable for a union, they still don’t want us.

On the whole, cycling is such an old-fashioned sport, especially the governing bodies and big race organizers. They prefer to keep things as much as possible as it is right now, because then they have the most power.

It seems like you’re able to get a lot done, though.

I do think that sometimes, because we are independent, we don’t get money from those stakeholders, then we don’t have to be afraid for…well, it’s not even a job, I’m a volunteer, I have my own day job. But, that’s still a very good position to be in: If you really want to make change, you don’t make change by being friends with everybody.

We were talking before we started about triathlon. Have you looked at how other sports do it, running or triathlon or swimming. Obviously, the big sports in the U.S., football or basketball, have collective bargaining, but even sports that are more similar to cycling: Have you talked to them on how to get this all done?

It’s one of the reasons that we got Jean-François Reymond on board last year as a director, because he comes from basketball and has worked with EU athletes. He’s been working way more with those kinds of sports that have collective bargaining agreements. We have also talked with different sports as well. For example, the Surf League I think is really interesting. Another one where it’s maybe a little bit similar is the PTO, though it’s more a league than a union of course.

There’s also a very big difference between Europe and the U.S., like how we look at sports. And it might also be hard to change a sport like cycling—I mean I love it, but it’s such an old-fashioned sport.

I think there is an opportunity for women’s cycling to do it differently, because women’s cycling doesn’t have the history men’s cycling has and they can do things in a different way. Everyone tries to keep copying men’s cycling into women’s cycling, but then we will just make the same mistakes in the end. That’s a bit of a missed opportunity.

I’ve looked at your survey every year, so I can probably guess the answer to this, but what do you think are the biggest issues you see in women’s cycling? What were they when you were a rider, and what’s gotten better?

The financial situation is probably still the biggest issue for riders and what we see is that at the top of the sport it’s really improving, but on the Continental level, with riders getting into the sports, basically nothing’s changed. 

People always like to compare men’s cycling and women’s cycling, but I believe in women’s cycling the issue is more about the disparity within the peloton. We should not have a top-down approach, but the other way around. Look at how can you improve things for the girls who come into the sport, to make sure they stay in the sport and have a safe working environment, that they’re not constantly disappointed by empty promises. It’s a very similar problem in men’s cycling, but in men’s cycling you have three tiers so there is a little bit more of a stepping stone career path, and it’s so much bigger. In women’s cycling, because it’s so much smaller, there’s also less talent coming into the sport of course. We have to be way more careful with that talent.

Is that what you all are focusing on? I know in the survey this year it said 25% of riders still don’t get paid. Is that going to be your focus for next year?

It’s really the working conditions on the Continental teams. The salary on those teams is not even the biggest issue for riders, or prize money. Really the biggest issue is to be able to have a safe working environment, to make sure that your team and yourself are insured, that you have a race program, that you have proper equipment, that you have professional staff with you at the races. That if you have a contract all the parties stick to that contract. 

Because at the beginning of the year, when riders sign contracts, the sky is the limit, but at the end of the season we see, especially on some Continental teams, that riders get disappointed time and time. Sometimes they’re even in dangerous situations. It’s stuff like not capable staff members or 10 riders in a team house with two bedrooms. It all sounds amazing if you’re from the UK or Australia, you think ‘Oh, I have a contract with a Spanish team, I can race in Europe!’ But if you’re in the middle of nowhere, in a team house with no salary, no team car, there’s nowhere you can go; if you crash out of a race and you have a concussion, and you get no medical care, you’re not insured. Those are the situations that really worry us.

This is really the first priority. There are a few regulations in place, but not enough. And then it’s important that the stakeholders, like the national federations or the UCI, make sure that if a team doesn’t stick to a regulation or their contract that there are consequences. 

Then, the next step is having a salary, being able to live off your sport. There are definitely riders who still are able to live at home or to study. It’s not realistic to say every Continental riders should have a $50,000 salary a year; that money is not available now. We have to do it step by step. Really the safety, the working conditions, it’s the most important.

Another thing we’ve been really active about is visibility, of riders, of races. We have seen that increasing a lot in the last few yers and that means there’s more money going into the sport. Obviously, it’s not just cycling, but all women’s sports—but women’s cycling is growing. More money, more visibility, more attention.

Has it gotten better since you were a rider?

Yeah. In my best days, I made €20,000 a year, maybe €24,000. I think if I was that same kind of rider now, I would make maybe €70-80,000. That has increased a lot in just 5, 6, 7 years. 

And there are a lot more opportunities now, because the races are more visible. There are more opportunities for riders to work on their own brand. In my time, when I was racing, people only knew Marianne Vos, basically because she won everything and was in the newspaper. Now, this year, I did commentary for some women’s races on Eurosport, and if we have a three-hour broadcast I can also talk about the other riders in the peloton, in the early break, etc. So there is more story you can tell. 

There are all kinds of studies showing that female athletes are capitalizing on building their brand, and they’re doing a better job at connecting and delivering value for sponsors.

I think that’s also probably because brands see an opportunity where they get with a different kind of role model. Trek is a good example. They hired Lizzie Deignan when she was still pregnant with her first kid. They gave her a multi-year contract, and it was a big experiment because almost nobody had done it before. They didn’t know if she would be the top rider she was before but they knew she had a great story that would appeal to a lot of their customers. I think it’s a good example of looking at branding athletes in a different way.

Is there anything else you wish other sports knew about female cyclists?

It’s important that we keep working closely with the athletes, so they always know ‘we have the TCA backing us.’ That makes a big difference compared to when I was a rider and I felt often like I was on my own. I think it’s a really powerful thing.

What I really appreciate about the women’s peloton is that, since we started, we’ve been able to unite in one association and be really vocal and strong. And, I would say, in general, female athletes are pretty smart. The level of education in the peloton is quite high, and it’s really special to see that if you are united a sa group there are a lot of things you can get done.

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Given the time of year, it seemed like a good time to talk about how to navigate mental health pitfalls, issues to keep an eye out for as triathletes have a tendency to go to extremes, and how to have a healthy relationship with endurance sports.

A few of Jill’s recent studies:

• “There just isn't any other option—so we just have to put up with it”: mental health in women's cycling and the necessity of structural change

• A review of mental health issues in high-performance and elite level cycling

• A comprehensive review of mental health disorders in ultra endurance athletes

• Prevalence and type of psychopathy in ultra endurance athletes

You were an ultrarunner. Maybe you can start by telling us how you got interested in researching the mental health aspects of endurance sports?

I started off as a triathlete. Actually, first, I did some marathons and then I moved over to triathlon and then, from triathlon, I moved into ultramarathons. And the reason why this became interesting to me is that I went through a period of overtraining syndrome, where I was just training way more than necessary to achieve whatever goals I had at the time.

I’m saying this in retrospect, with hindsight. At the time I thought I was just having a great time running all up and down the trails. But really what was happening is I was using the sport to accomplish things over than physical fitness.

So I became curious what could lead a person to overdo it to the point where they actually physically harm themselves. And what I realized was that it was not a physiology question. It was a psychology question. There’s a decision-making process that has to go into play there, because the reason why my body broke down is why anyone’s body would break down. It’s not because your body is functioning incorrectly—your body is doing its job—it’s that your brain is telling you to do something that it shouldn’t be doing. 

I became very curious about what would lead to that. Then that led me to go to graduate school and get a Master’s degree, then further in my research. Now I’m a research affiliate at the University of Bern, in Switzerland, in the department of sports psychiatry.

Your first thesis was on the prevalence of mental health issues in endurance sports, and you’ve done a lot more work on that since. What have you found in terms of how prevalent mental health issues are?

At the time, I did the research with 524 ultra-endurance athletes from different backgrounds, different sports.

There was a greater prevalence of mental illness in that popular vs. a general population, and in particular there was a greater incidence of things like depression and anxiety, eating disorder, in that population versus the general population.

And the second part was we found that the more hours per week an athlete was training the more likely they were to have mental illness. It did have a kind of dose effect—and it went straight up. 

Was that surprising?

If you ask me, the ultrarunner and triathlete, I would say no. If you ask me, the scientist, I would say, ‘Goodness, yes, that was quite surprising.’

In the first part of the question, with regards to prevalence, I did have in mind that would be the case. But I did not know there was going to be this ramping up in prevalence with the amount of time one spent training, and that was a secondary finding, I wasn’t even planning to find it, but the data did show me that.

It’s also very interesting, as a commentary on the community at large, because a lot of us are under the impression that if some amount of physical fitness brings mental health benefits then a whole lot of it is going to bring more mental health benefits. And we see that’s not true. If it were, then those people training upwards of 25-30 hours/week, would be very very happy and blissful and feeling good about their lives, and that was not the case.

Well, the weeks I’ve hit 25 hours, I was definitely not happy or blissful. They’re quite miserable weeks, but you do them for some other reason or goal, right?

Sure, and it’s interesting because the impression that you get from the data was that those who were exercising at that high a level were not bouncing into a week like that and then bouncing out, they were kind of holding steady somewhere around that amount of training—so there’s something going on that we really should look at.

Have you been able to look at it more? Have you been able to separate out the issue of causation: Does someone have mental health issues and so they’re running to extremes as an outlet, or is the running causing those issues?

The chicken or egg question, right? It is a research proposal that I just handed in, 10 days ago. When a person is engaging in this type of physical activity, is there something about this activity that brings about this experience of mental illness? Or is it that people who are more likely to have mental illness are somehow more attracted to this type of activity? And is it that they feel as though it’s doing something for them, so they do more of it—or are there people for whom this type and level of activity really is the catalyst for mental illness? We just don’t know that yet.

Instinctively, I feel like, anecdotally, we know that there are some people who use running to extremes or whatever it is to substitute for something else, right?

Absolutely, but we also know that there are things where the neurotransmitters really create a beautiful environment in your your brain when you’re moving and exercising, for various reasons. There are things that happen, which kind of make it compelling for someone to go back and try to get that process to be induced again. We really just need to study more about it. 

Unfortunately, we don’t know much about people who are exercising at those upper levels, higher amounts. We know a lot about what happens when people are in the sweet spot we always talk about, the 120 to 150 minutes/week. But to extrapolate out for 25 hours/week, we don’t have the data up there at all. 

Every other condition on the planet—from how much you eat to how much you sleep, how strong the sun is—is a U-shaped curve. Everything we interact with is: Zero is terrible and a whole lot is awful, somewhere in the middle is good. But we just don’t accept that with physical activity. And the reason why we don’t accept it, it’s not logical, it’s cultural. We’re not interested in that as a limitation, we’re like, ‘Oh no, that doesn’t work for me.’ Well, it works for everything else in the world.

I actually thought we all knew there was a point at which too much exercise is not a good idea?

I think human beings have an instinct for when maybe something may become too much. However, we’ve been gaslit into believing that’s not really our limitation, we can really go farther. Because we have lots of people screaming in our ears about ‘no limits,’ and ‘there’s an obesity epidemic, so you better keep moving.’ Couple that with the fact that CDC guidelines for physical fitness literally say on their website: ‘the more, the better.’ The message becomes muddy because you’re viewing fitness influencers and, let’s face it, even those of us who wouldn’t call ourselves that are fitness influencers at this point. If you’re an average triathlete and posting about your workouts, you’re an influencer in some way, and the people you surround yourself with are influencing you and you’re being influenced by them. You’re all kind of speaking the same language, which after awhile, particularly in endurance sports, starts to become an echo chamber. What you think of as a lot vs. a little bit of training becomes skewed. In this community, we think ‘I’m going to go out in the rain, no matter what.’ There’s this kind of concept of what’s normal and what’s not that gets skewed, big time.

And so where we have those instincts for ‘oh no, this is too much,’ they become overridden. 

What are these overtraining signs and symptoms you look for when you talk to athletes? Because, in your example here, if you have some goal, then you’re probably going to have to run in the rain sometimes—maybe not every time, but sometimes—and that’s not necessarily bad. But there’s a point at which, if you get hypothermia and you’re still out there, it’s a bad choice. So what are the signs that someone is taking it too far? What do you talk to athletes about, what should they look for?

When you start to make decisions that put training above everything—and I’m going to throw nutrition in there too because it’s the partner to the training in a way that can have a positive or negative effect on our mental health, and training does not operate in a vacuum—when we start to make decisions that have a negative effect on the rest of our lives. That is where we have to start wondering if we’re headed down the right path.

For example, when we are consistently prioritizing training over things like personal safety, physical safety, I’m even going to throw mental injury in there, because there are some times when the thought of going out again and doing another training session is crippling. There are things like: you’re isolating yourself from other people and events, not just ‘I had to miss whatever thing this one time,’ but it’s chronic. It can be very easy to make those decisions that prioritize training in a way that really starts to have a detrimental effect on everything else. Leaving work early, getting to work late, not paying attention to family, letting work slip or academic life slip, letting nutrition slip, not sleeping, not taking rest days, not having an off-season. All these things start to come into play.

It’s when your life is curving around your training; it’s not that your training is curving around your life.

What are the most common mental health issues you see with ultrarunners and triathletes? I saw the studies recently where it was 20-40% of are addicted to exercise. Obviously, there’s overtraining syndrome and underfueling, which are the same thing basically. What are the things you see most frequently?

First of all, I want to say that in the U.S. we use the DSM-5 and in Europe we use the ICD-11. In either of those diagnostic bibles there is no place for exercise addiction, it does not exist. It is only listed secondary to eating disorder, and that’s not what we’re talking about here. So we can talk about it somewhat—I did a narrative review paper and I mentioned exercise addiction or exercise dependence—but because it’s not a diagnosable condition, we can’t really talk about prevalence.

The rest of the stuff is going to be depression, anxiety, substance abuse, eating disorder. The numbers on eating disorder are dramatically incorrect, because they’re not catching a lot of sort of exercise bulimia—and those kind of behaviors are happening, particularly in ultra endurance sports. We do know, from some earlier research, that the most undiagnosed category is men. They’re not the most prevalence, but they’re the most undiagnosed group.

There’s also a significant contingent who are neuro diverse in one way or another. We’ve got more autism in ultra endurance sports that we think, more ADHD. We’re just not sure about what the numbers are, but there’s a significant portion.

When I talk to athletes, I see a lot of depression, a lot of anxiety. A lot of it is related to training, but a lot is related to nutrition as well. People are not fueling properly, they are not eating enough. The new REDS guidelines put a heavy emphasis on low energy availability and I would argue that, although it’s not a mental health condition, there are two reasons you get to that point: 1. Either ignorance, because you don’t know about sports nutrition and that’s fine, let’s get you the information you need to get better (but that’s a small portion of the athletes), and then 2. There’s the rest of everybody else, who are trying to do something else there—and that *is* a mental health issue. Low energy availability is not a mental health condition, but you don’t get there because you’re making smart decisions.

So is it possible to do an Ironman or a 100K or something, you know, longer—not a half-marathon—and be mentally healthy?

I think you definitely can, and it starts with solid nutrition and training plans, which operate on a ‘less is more’ kind of motto. Which is in contrast to the higher mileage training that was sort of in vogue awhile back. I think what elites can handle tends to skew what we think we should be doing.

If people train on a different mindset, a rest day every week, an off-season, and they’re stingy with their races every year. ie. ‘I’m going to do one big race a year and maybe a couple of little ones.’

For sure I don’t think training for an Ironman means you’re mentally ill, not at all. But I think it really requires work on the back end. Your first questions should be: Why am I doing this? And if it’s like, you know, ‘I wanna get through my divorce.’ Which, by the way, I’m calling myself out from when I was a newly divorced 20-something-year-old. Think about what you’re doing and why are you doing it, have resources and people you can talk to, can you get yourself a quality dietician, are you getting good advice.

I've said this in other places, but: Your relationship with ultra endurance sport is not a baseball bat that you use to wack at everything that’s wrong in your life. It’s like a crystal vase you take out when someone buys you roses for Valentine’s Day. You’re careful with it, you do what you need to do with it, and when it’s done you put it back on the shelf. It’s fragile. And if you use it like a baseball bat, you’re going to break everything in your life, including yourself.

I think the thing that’s always interesting to me is: I’m sure there are all kinds of mental health issues in pro sports and with the age-group athletes who are doing 25 hours/week every week, but at some point there’s nothing healthy about trying to win an Ironman World Championship. You’re not doing it to be healthy, you’re doing it for some other reason, to see if it’s possible?

I mean that’s the whole joke about ‘How many Olympians have overbearing fathers? All of them.’ Alternatively, me, I personally, get out there and it gets hard and I think, ‘You know what, I have other options in life,’ and then I’m not winning a world championship.

I could answer that as an athlete or I could answer it as a scientist. We see, time and again, that in order to do what you have to do in these ultra endurance sports you have to be able to override certain things about your instincts and your human tolerance. Because you can’t just muscle through. And people often use, either purposefully or inadvertently, other issues to be the driving force for their discipline or determination. 

Some of it’s healthy, some of it’s not. We’re all different.

Which is why we need more research in this area. Across the board, what people are willing to do to participate in sports on an elite level, particularly where there’s not much budget and there’s a lot of abuse going on, it’s pretty wild. What is this doing for people that they’re willing to mess themselves up? It’s a great question, and I don’t know the answer. 

There are inextricable links between what we think about ourselves and what we need to see about ourselves when we participate in these sports. We need to be enthusiastic about our community and we love the sport, that’s great, but we also need to watch where your life starts to bend around it rather than it bending back to your life. It’s really important.

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Our intrepid friend in the UK, Tim Heming, sat down with D’Souza to talk about the Enhanced Games, if/how/why it could work, and what his goal actually is. It’s an interview that may make you absolutely nuts—and definitely leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Is this the most cynical and saddest idea in sports, or kind of a smart media play to highlight longstanding issues?

You might have caught wind of The Enhanced Games during the past couple of weeks—because the new concept of an Olympics-style event where performance enhancing drugs aren’t banned, but are actively encouraged, has been making headlines like a PR campaign on steroids. 

The brainchild of Aron D’Souza, a London-based businessman, the first edition of the controversial Games are planned to run in December next year. 

D’Souza, who says he has invested millions of his own dollars into the project, has lofty ambitions to go head-to-head with the Olympics Games, which he claims is riven with corruption, wastes billions on bureaucracy and infrastructure vanity projects, and has exploited its athletes for decades. 

We caught up with him to try to understand the motivation behind the idea and whether he’s planning to include swim-bike-run among his events.

Aron, thank you for your time. Why did you decide to start the Enhanced Games?

Aron D’Souza: I’ve been inspired by the Olympic Games since I was a small child. I remember watching 1992 in Barcelona as a seven-year-old and clearly remember seeing Juan Antonio Samaranch, then the IOC [International Olympic Committee] president, being front and center. I thought: ‘Who is this guy?’ 

As I got older, I read about him and was like: ‘Wow, he’s a really bad person!’ An associate of [Spanish dictator] Francisco Franco who rules the Olympics with an iron fist. It continues to this day under Thomas Bach’s regime.

That was gestating in my mind for a long time, then I also read a lot of academics, such as Dr. Julian Savulescu from Oxford, who is a bioethicist, outlining the hypocrisy of the anti-doping regime, how it’s not science-based or in the interests of the athletes, and how it creates an unsafe environment.

About a year ago, I talked with a friend in Los Angeles, who is an endocrinologist, who got really big, really quickly by taking steroids. I said: ‘But you’re a doctor!’ And he replied that he knew how to do it safely.

Hearing how he was so open about it, and learning that about 14.83% of men in America have tried anabolic steroids [per a survey he says they conducted of sports-watching Americans] and 95% of NFL players have used anabolic steroids, it’s really quite prevalent in our society. Someone has to bring this to the forefront.

We’ve had so many athletes, scientists and doctors reach out to us since we’ve launched and we can really see that an alternative to the Olympic Games is here. I think we can turn this into something very real because people are unhappy with the way international sports is run.

If we start with anti-doping, why do you feel the current model is “unsafe?”

Number one, WADA [World Anti-Doping Agency] is not an independent entity. Its funding comes from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Thomas Bach is in control of it. It's the secret police.

Number two, the drugs that are excluded under the WADA code are purely subjective. It’s not a question of a safety threshold. The WADA code reads: ‘Does it affect the spirit of sports?’ Let’s be clear, that has nothing to do with athlete safety, but everything to do with the IOC’s ability to control athletics. 

The IOC was born by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who we all know was a racist, classist, and whose method of control over the athletes was amateurism. Until the 1980s, you had to be an amateur athlete and if you had ever taken money for being a professional—sponsorship or otherwise—you were branded a cheat.

The Olympic movement of the early 20th century talked about clean sports and that was all about keeping professionalism out of sports. They lost that by 1992 and ever since then they have ramped up drug testing as a means of control over the athletes.

Rivers of gold are flowing into the top, $8 billion dollars of revenue is coming into the IOC, Thomas Bach is flying around in a private jet, living in a palace, and the athletes have never stood up or gotten their fair share. Why is that? Because of the drug testing regime. It’s the IOC’s method of control over the athletes. If the athlete is causing any trouble, whether it’s politically or in terms of unionization, the first thing they say is: ‘We’re going to retest your old samples.’ There are millions of frozen samples and they have tacitly allowed the top athletes to use performance enhancements so that they can keep this method of control in place. It is sick and pernicious.

Do you have any evidence for these claims?

I’ve talked to hundreds of athletes and hear the same story over and over again. We have built the official opposition movement to the IOC and are building a WikiLeaks-style operation. We are gathering evidence on Olympic corruption and I’m looking forward to sharing hard evidence with journalists. The soft evidence is indicting, but there will be documentary evidence in due course.

This is a rotten system and at the core of it is the financial exploitation of athletes, which has allowed sports administrators to keep their multi-million dollar salaries and private jets flying.

The IOC would firmly dispute this. Have you faced legal action from the IOC for your allegations?

I look forward to it. If you look through my history, I have been a very successful litigator. I led the litigation against Gawker Media for the billionaire Peter Thiel, where we won one of the largest invasion of privacy judgements in history involving the wrestler Hulk Hogan.

I hope we will have the opportunity to debate the IOC, whether in a journalistic form or in court, because ultimately they need to be held to account. In the 120-year history of the Olympic movement I’m quite confident to say I'm the very first person who has gone to work everyday trying to build an alternative.

What format is this alternative going to take?

The core problem with the Olympic Games is that it uses a format that was invented over 120 years ago: moving around every four years, building a dozen stadiums and then throwing them away after two weeks. You can go to Rio and Athens and see the ruins of Olympics excess. The fundamental problem is infrastructure.

So, the Enhanced Games is going to focus on sports that really matter. I’m sorry, breakdancing, curling, and bobsled are not going to be in. It’s going to focus on the sports that people actually watch and have the biggest impact in terms of television and social media.

The core sports are divided into five categories: track and field, swimming, gymnastics, weight lifting, and combat sports. Those can all be done without specialist infrastructure, so we don’t need to build a velodrome, for example, which costs $100 million and gets thrown away in two weeks. Instead, the money will go to the athletes. 

We’re also going to run our Games every year and go to the same cities over and over. We’re in venue negotiations right now and will be announcing host cities soon.

Do you plan to include triathlon?

Triathlon is not that expensive a sport to run. It does depend on our selection of host cities, do they have enough open water, etc? [But if they do] more likely than not, and I won’t commit to this publicly, we would look to include triathlon. 

There is a triathlon almost every weekend here in London and a large community of people doing the event production all over the world. As long as there is an event production partner in our host city, we’d look to include triathlon.

Ultimately, what triathlon has done very well is that it is a remarkably participatory sport. Unlike swimming, where you have to get involved with your national federation, national Olympic committee, and jump through bureaucratic hoops, in triathlon, particularly Ironman, anyone can show up. All you need is a bicycle and a pair of shoes and you can participate. 

Individuals then feel like they are part of the Ironman community; they go on the Ironman journey in this beautiful way and can be competing in an event in Melbourne or London and feel part of the wider community and be on track for qualification to Kona. 

What is great about Ironman is that they go back to Kona every year and do that so beautifully, cheaply, and efficiently. Ironman is a for-profit corporation and has been very efficiently run as a result. You don’t see huge corruption scandals.

Sticking with that line or thought, and given triathletes have to go through their national federation for Olympic selection, would you prefer Ironman as a partner?

No athlete has ever said a good thing about their sport’s federation. No one is happy that there are these bureaucrats, detached from the day-to-day of the athlete, making the decisions. 

Less so triathlon, which is highly objective, but look at gymnastics. It’s ripe for abuse because ultimately there is a large subjective element in being on the squad.

We don’t need them, they become useless bureaucracy that is a bad business model. Most federations don’t generate any income of their own and are just dependent on grant funding from the IOC.

By excluding the federations, we can have a much more direct relationship with the athletes—like Ironman does—and bring them into a community that supports our wider movement.

If you strip away the federations, rules and regulations are still required. For example, do you want the 100 fastest athletes in the world or the fastest athlete from each of 100 countries? Who sets the parameters for entry?

We’re recruiting an athletes’ advisory board so we can design the event operations to best suit the athletes in particular sports. Of course we need officialdom; referees and administrators who run the events, but I don’t think we need this ever-sprawling self-perpetuating, money-sucking, vampire of operations like these sports federations. 

Ultimately, they control the cash cow and get paid first and no one else gets paid. Our model will be leaner, unbureaucratic, and apolitical, and make decisions efficiently like an athlete-led corporation.

When will we see the first Enhanced Games?

We’re presently looking at December 2024, after using the next year to become the official opposition movement to the Olympics. 

We will be going to the Paris Olympics supporting athletes who have been accused of using performance enhancements and will organize lawyers to help their defense, while advocating for an alternative model. We can use that publicity in our media to drive the growth of our movement and ticket sales leading into our first event.

Our core sports can be run on a DI university campus. That necessarily means it has to happen out of term time. The first term break after Paris is in December, which necessitates somewhere warm, so California, Texas, and Florida are possible host locations for the first event.

There are also other countries, like Portugal, that are extremely supportive of enhancements. We might be looking toward a jurisdiction that is favorable from a political standpoint, however we don’t see any political risk in running in the U.S. Sports events like X Games or bodybuilding competitions do not have drug testing regimes, for example.

How are you funded?

Like any other Silicon Valley start-up. We raise equity capital. I have a two-decade background in start-up land and have built and sold three companies, so I’m self funding right now. We have term sheets [business agreements] from some of the biggest venture capital funds in the world and we’re going to raise tens of millions of dollars to put on the first event. 

A lot of people say: ‘How can you put on a new Olympics? It will cost you billions of dollars.’ If you redesign the Games without wasted infrastructure it can be done so much cheaper and possibly profitably. We’ll be announcing our funding structure in the next few weeks.

The media attention we’ve gotten has been validating. There is one Reddit thread with 500 comments and the vast majority are extremely supportive. That’s a good indicator that consumers want to see this. They want to see world records getting broken and they want to see what human beings are capable of.

Look at Formula 1, an extraordinarily popular sport and combination of humanity and engineering, man and machine, and that exactly the same kind of ethos the Enhanced Games is bringing.

How much money have you put in yourself?

Single digit millions. I’ve spent 20 years building my brand and reputation, working in some of the most prominent organizations in the world and best-selling books have been written about me. I’m putting my name on the line here. No matter what the financial investment, it’s an investment of reputation.

I'm a businessman, but the real courageous individuals are Olympians like Roland Schoeman, a gold medal swimmer from South Africa, Christina Smith, a bobsledder from Canada, and Brett Fraser, a swimmer from the Cayman Islands. For them to commit to this project before we were public and knew what the reaction would be is a level of courage that I have never seen in my life. They were the ones who really inspired me.

How many athletes have signed up in support?

You can see all the athletes at enhancedgames.org [the website lists six athletes on the advisory board], but we also have scientists like Dr. George Church, who is a professor of genetics at Harvard, and Dr. Kyle Grant from NASA, really extraordinary clinical thinkers who are supporting this. 

It’s impossible to keep up at the moment. I have had 11 new registrations on the website since we started talking. There is a Team GB Tokyo 2020 athlete and National Health Service doctor who reached out this morning and said: ‘I always wanted this.’ We can see it coming together beautifully. The message resonates. These athletes are sick and tired of these sports federations and they want to earn a living, and fundamentally deserve to be rewarded. Yes, it’s bold and controversial and some people won’t like it, but that’s always the case with disruption.

Think about Uber. [Founder] Travis Kalanick never drove a taxi cab. All the taxi cab owners and regulators didn’t like it, but it was better for consumers and better for drivers, and we are building something that’s much, much better for athletes, more interesting to watch, and a format designed for the modern world.

Our attention spans have gotten shorter and shorter and once every four years is a format that doesn’t work. It’s a dying market and the Olympics know their demographic is falling apart.

On our website we have a whole section about how to come out as enhanced. It’s a journey. It takes a lot of time for them to get comfortable, to make that jump. They fear they are going to be rejected by their teammates, sports federation and the IOC, and ultimately it takes an immense act of courage. It’s easier now as it’s a movement growing every day. We’re creating momentum.

If you’re going to allow athletes to take performance enhancing drugs with impunity, are health issues a concern?

Absolutely, and the Enhanced Games are safer than the Olympics. Because of the WADA code, the Olympics forces the use of enhancements underground. 

The triathlon community is ripe with the use of enhancements. I listened to a podcast with Collin [Chartier]. He orders EPO online and injects himself, and doesn’t even really know what he is doing. That’s really unsafe. This is the fundamental problem. Competitive athletics demand taking whatever is necessary to achieve great success, and in the Olympics you have to do that underground without clinical supervision, which is fundamentally unsafe.

The argument—or Olympic ideal—is that you don’t take the drugs, don’t endanger your health, and play by the rules though…

But it’s clearly not [the case]. Look at Lance Armstrong. He passed 500 drug tests and everyone knew he was on EPO. Lance was able to do it for that long because he had his own doctors and could spend millions, but poor athletes like Collin Chartier are self-medicating, which is really unsafe.

In the Enhanced Games, we can do it out in the open, under clinical supervision, with scientific support where data can be shared and products improved, and it can all be safe.

You only need to look at the legalization of cannabis in the United States. Taking a black market product and making it regulated has made the environment much safer.

We are confident this will be a safer environment and one that will ultimately be good for humanity. It’s showing how medical science can improve the capabilities of human beings to make us stronger and younger and faster for longer. It is ultimately the route to anti-aging and the fountain of youth. It might sound like science fiction but we live in this era of technological and social change and this will be one of the great enablers.

But cannabis smokers are not trying to beat the person next to them by seeing who can get the highest. In a competitive environment, won’t the temptation be to push for performance at any cost, and it will become dangerously unhealthy?

Ultimately, athletes are adults with free and informed consent, and should be able to do what they want with their own bodies. My body my choice, your body your choice. 

I don’t think any government or paternalistic sports federation should make that decision for individuals. We should make those decisions ourselves on our individual risk tolerances and thresholds. 

Do you expect performance levels to be higher than we see in the Olympic Games?

If they are not better than what we see in the Olympics, it’ll be a shocking indictment on the Olympics. 

I do think we’re going to obliterate the world records. We’ll see what human beings are capable of and it will be a watershed moment in the history of humanity—a new generation of superheroes. 

Go to the cinema today. The most popular movies are superhero movies and this is literally what our movement is about, using science and the best of humanity and a dose of courage to see how great we can become. 

The Olympics are about the past, Greek gods and the natural world. I don’t think that’s what consumers or athletes want anymore. I think we have a much better narrative to suit this modern, technologically-driven world.

In terms of combat sports, do you have concerns that if athletes become ever bigger and stronger and hit harder, brain injuries will become more prevalent?

Take a look at the most popular sport among young people today. Professional slap fighting, Dana White’s new Powerslap League. We won't be having that at our games, I think it’s pretty disgusting, but I also think the biggest risk to athletes is their mental health. The Enhanced Games will be much better for the mental health of athletes because it doesn’t have the pressure cooker environment. Most Olympians have one shot because it’s every four years. That's a bad recipe. 

Secondly, they have no financial stability, which brings in other mental health issues. 

By investing in a new business model and running the Games more frequently, I think we can have much better mental health outcomes for our athletes, with no greater risk of brain injuries.  

Finally, are those visiting and registering on the website just curious or do they share your vision? 

It's everything from media enquiries to athletes and scientists joining up. The response has been phenomenal and it's so validating. In building any movement, it's the first five, 10, 15 followers that are the hardest. We’ve about 20 named on our website and in six months time there will be several thousand formally involved and we can take on the Olympics.

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