A retired member of the GB Alpine Ski Team, who faced many adversities during her time as an athlete in her campaign to rise to the top of her sport, is now helping other athletes with the launch of a new, confidential support scheme called the Athlete Support Network.
Rachelle Rogers, 27, from Guildford, was one of GB Alpine Skiing’s rising stars back in the early 2010s. Having made an impression at 15 years old in her first season as a FIS athlete by scoring a sub 50 result in slalom and claiming her first international victory, she went on to compete at the Winter Youth Olympic Games in 2012, was selected multiple times to compete at the World Junior Championships and competed in a few Europa Cups.
However, whilst her career was off to a promising start, as time went on she began to face more and more challenges. She often felt alone and lost with regards to a path ahead, feeling she couldn’t fully confide in those around her.
When she looks back on her time as an elite athlete and reflects on the struggles she faced, having to overcome them and often feeling isolated from support, she felt there was a gap in the type of support available to athletes. Rachelle currently works as an airline pilot for one of Europe’s major airlines and has come across the Pilot Peer Support Programme - a scheme set up after the Germanwings accident in 2015 designed to improve pilot welfare support around mental health issues. This programme inspired her idea for developing and launching a similar service for athletes.
To access the service, athletes complete an online form which is then reviewed by the programme leads who assess the athlete’s needs and allocate them a mentor. The mentor will then support the athlete for an agreed period of time via phone calls.
The team of volunteers receive assistance and guidance from a mental health professional and are trained in signposting. The service is the pilot project launched by the not-for-profit organisation, Athlete Interactions, which was founded by a group of athletes who met on the Women’s Sport Trust’s Unlocked programme, including GB Swimmer and Chemical Engineering PhD student Amber Keegan.
Rachelle and Amber met through working as members of TASS’s Talented Athlete Advisory Group. They both wanted to launch a mentor scheme and taking each other’s ideas, they combined both of their concepts to create the Athlete Support Network.
Rachelle was just a year or so short of starting her senior career when she decided to retire from alpine skiing in 2015 whilst rehabilitating a knee injury. Through the help of a counsellor, she came up with the idea of a parachute and each string of the parachute represented something that she felt was holding her back from skiing her best.
As she identified each factor, she realised she could not let any of them go.
Thus despite her best efforts, she would always be skiing around with this parachute holding her back and slowing her down and therefore unable to become the best ski racer she could be. Following on from this discovery, she stepped away from the ski racing world and her childhood dream of becoming an Olympian to instead pursue a new ambition of becoming an airline pilot.
Making that transition away from ski racing was painful and reflecting on that time, Rachelle said “Retiring from ski racing is still to this day one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make. I experienced quite a profound period of grieving. Upon retirement, I wanted nothing to do with anyone or anything related to ski racing. I felt worthless because I was ‘the skier’ and suddenly that identity had gone.
"I felt I had failed and let a lot of people down. However, I was grateful that I had a clear path ahead – the road to becoming an airline pilot. It was very methodical in terms of it’s process because you have to achieve A then B then C, etc. That really helped me with moving on. Yet I know when I look back at that time, I would have really benefited from having someone to talk to support me through the process of transitioning out of sport.”
“When I came across the Pilot Peer Support Programme through my work, I related to the idea of peer to peer support and could see how athletes would benefit from a similar type of support. When you are an athlete, even from an underfunded sport like alpine skiing which lacks a World Class Programme and thus all the resources that come with that, you still have some form of a support network around you. For example I had my coach, my parents, a few school friends, my S&C coach, etc.
"Yet there are some things you just don’t feel comfortable sharing with people in your support network because they are so close to you and have an invested interest in your results. When I was deciding to retire from ski racing, I experienced first hand the benefit of reaching out to a third party – someone removed from my support network. I knew by talking to the counsellor, I would be empowered to make my own decision without the influence of anyone in my support network and that was of paramount importance to avoid feeling any resentment towards anyone in the future.”
“That self-empowerment is something we are striving to achieve through the Athlete Support Network. We created it by recognising the gap in the way athletes are supported. We see the need for peer-to-peer support because we respect not every issue an athlete is going through is one they feel comfortable sharing with their direct support network (friends, family, teammates, coaches, etc). We appreciate the benefit of talking to someone removed from a situation, but who can directly relate to the athlete lifestyle. We hope that athletes feel they no longer have to struggle in silence. We are here to listen and signpost you towards getting the support and help you need. The Athlete Support Network and in extension, Athlete Interactions, is run for athletes, by athletes.”
“We also promote the idea of seeing elite athletes as first and foremost, a human. Sport is an incredible facilitator in the development of young people towards becoming future leaders and ambassadors in their communities. Athletes develop strong non-technical skills from a young age and can transfer their passion, skills and values cultivated from competing at a high level towards becoming responsible, active and engaging citizens with the power to create positive changes in the world. So we hope through our work at Athlete Interactions, we will be able to inspire and empower the next generation by helping individuals feel seen, heard and valued as a human which transfers into their sporting performance and beyond.’’
For more information about Athlete Interactions, or to access the Athlete Support Network, visit www.athleteinteractions.com or via Instagram @athleteinteractions.