James Cracknell OBE

James Cracknell is one of Britain’s most successful athletes of all time, with two Olympic Gold medals and six World Championship titles.

His Olympic rowing finals – in Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004 – were epic battles, won by inches. But it is since retiring from his 13 year international career that James has distinguished himself as a very special sportsman.

Unwilling to get a ‘proper job’ in 2005, James teamed up with TV adventurer Ben Fogle to race across The Atlantic. Despite their ocean-rowing inexperience, the pair were first to arrive in Antigua. The experience was captured by the BBC in the documentary series ‘Through Hell and High Water’.

In 2008 James came up with the idea of pushing himself to his limits once again for charity, this time in collaboration with Sport Relief. Entirely under his own steam, James rowed The Channel; cycled down through France and Spain and finally swam The Strait of Gibraltar, accompanied by comedian David Walliams.

In December 2008 James attempted his toughest challenge yet when he set off with former team-mate Ben Fogle and Dr. Ed Coats in a race to the South Pole. Suffering frost-bite, infected blisters, dramatic weight-loss, pneumonia and exhaustion, the team finished second only to a pair of Norwegian polar experts. The adventure was filmed by the BBC – ‘On Thin Ice’.

Most recently, James suffered a major head injury when he was thrown off his bike in America whilst filming a TV show for the Discovery Channel. James has held a ten-year post as a Daily Telegraph journalist. He was the Olympic presenter for ITV News at Ten in Bejing; hosted Channel 4’s Red Bull Air Race and ITV1’s British Superbikes.

 

John Steele

John began his career in the army, trained at the prestigious Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Here, he learnt the essentials for strong effective leadership and soon developed a distinguished style of his own.

He left the army to pursue a career as a professional rugby player, and like most things John puts his hand to, he achieved great success, playing in over 400 first class games, including matches against Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. On retirement John turned to coaching, successfully leading Northampton Saints to become European Champions in 2000; their first major cup win.

Following the clubs victory, John became Executive Director on the Saints Board during a period of unprecedented off-field growth, including a share issue and stadium development. His experience in Rugby Union also saw him serve on the England Rugby Board during the successful World Cup campaign of 2003. He was also appointed as CEO of the Rugby Football Union.

In 2005 John became Chief Executive for UK Sport. A post which he held for six years leading the organisation through a remarkable period of successful change through Beijing and into the record breaking London 2012 Olympics. Post-London 2012, with the Nation’s focus on sporting successes and “inspiring a generation”, John became Group Chief Executive of the Youth Sport Trust.

John is also the Chairman of the English Institute of Sport, succeeding Steve Cram, and is helping to further the Institute’s success in delivering a range of performance impacting sport science solutions to over 40 Olympic and Paralympic sports, along with a select number of non-Olympic sports. To date, John’s Olympic and Paralympic involvement spans eight different games including the recent Rio Olympics and Paralympics.

Building on his lifelong passions of leadership and sport, John founded Unforgiving Minute, a niche consultancy with unique leadership development expertise from high-performance sport. At present John is also leading an ambitious change programme as Executive Director of Sport at Loughborough University.

Jonny Searle MBE

Jonny is a former Olympic and World Gold Medallist athlete, who competed as part of the British rowing team over a ten-year period, from 1989-1999.

Jonny’s sporting career highlights include winning an Olympic gold medal in 1992, an Olympic bronze medal in 1996 and a World Championship gold medal in 1993; all achieved whilst balancing his private practice lawyer career.

Since his retirement from elite sport, Jonny has served as General Counsel and Company Secretary at Modern Times Group MTG AB, one of Europe’s leading digital entertainment companies. Most recently Jonny has served as Group General Counsel of The Blair Partnership, a rights management business and worked with UKTV as a special advisor.

Jonny is therefore able to draw from a unique combination of experience; twenty years as a leader and lawyer in private practice and industry; ten years as an elite sportsman; and fifteen years of coaching and talent development.

As an executive coach and mentor, Jonny is passionate about inspiring, encouraging and enabling people to identify what success means to them and to make changes in behaviour, belief and commitment to achieve that success. He has helped individuals and teams to identify their purpose and to establish a culture for success.

His experience of coaching within elite sport, and competing in that environment paired with his business experience, grants him a unique insight into a high-performance culture.

Katharine Merry

Katharine is a rare Athlete who had outstanding success at both junior and senior level athletics. Having been the fastest girl in the world aged 14, 12 years later she became the fastest woman in the world over 400m.

Since Katharine’s retirement from Track & Field in 2005 the Olympic medallist has worked within the Event, Sport and Media industry at the same level that she enjoyed in her competitive career. Katharine is a hugely popular Event host who is able to absorb a brief and use her years of experience and knowledge to deliver on message, informative and entertaining commentary and interaction with the audience. Her unflappable nature and attention to detail, means that she can adapt to any situation and brings the best out of people she interviews.

Katharine is, in fact, the only female TV lead Commentator in Athletics, which has seen her working at numerous Olympic Games, Commonwealth Games, European Championships, as well as lead Commentator for Channel 4 at the Paralympics and Paralympic World Cup events.

Katharine has the versatility of being an established broadcaster and host around the World. Whether infield in the USA, live television presenting or behind the microphone being a lead commentator, she excels in her sport of Track and Field as well as Netball, Triathlon, Pentathlon or Beach Volleyball! Her sporting knowledge helps her hold her own as a regular guest on BBC Radio 5 Live’s “Fighting Talk” panel show and on a variety of established television and radio programmes.

Post retirement Katharine has also established herself as an engaging, insightful and entertaining speaker for a variety of organisations from corporate companies like Lloyds to those in the sporting and teaching world. Inspiring all with her journey from a 10 year old with an Olympic dream to being an Olympic medallist, she shares her journey plus the skills and disciplines involved.

 

Katherine Grainger

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Katherine Grainger is Britain’s most successful international female rower. In 2012 she won the Olympic gold with Anna Watkins in the double scull, breaking the Olympic Record in the process.

Katherine is the only British female athlete from any sport to win medals in four consecutive Olympic Games.

Her international rowing career took off in 1997 when, still a student, she became Under-23 World Champion setting a new world record. In the same year she was invited to join the GB Rowing Squad and won her first senior medal at that year’s world championships. Since then she has been world champion six times. Uniquely in the UK, she has won world championship medals in all available boat classes: the single, pair, double, quad and eight.

Katherine has won 3 Olympic silver rowing medals at Sydney, Athens and Beijing.

She was awarded an MBE for services to sport in 2006, and a CBE in 2012.

Katherine received her law degree from Edinburgh University and then went on to complete a Masters in Medical Law and Medical Ethics at Glasgow University. She also has a PhD in criminal law from King’s College, London.

Katherine was named ‘Dame Katherine Grainger’ in the 2017 New Year’s Honours List for services to rowing and charity.

Mark Bawden

Mark spent 20 years as a performance psychologist, which saw him work across elite sport, education, health and business. He is the co-founder of Mindflick® – an organisation focused on blending cutting-edge performance psychology and people development; throwing in plenty of passion and innovation for good measure.

Mark has a philosophy of positive psychology, where practitioners focus on developing strengths, become immersed into their sports and work in close alignment with coaches. The intention is to develop strategic solution focused interventions.

Mark is a Chartered Sports Psychologist with over 15 years’ experience of working in elite sport, education, health and business. His doctoral research was on the “yips”, a phenomenon (which he experienced as a promising young bowler), where sports performers apparently lose their ability and skill to perform their sport overnight.

Mark’s current focus is on a tried and tested concept which he has developed called “Superstrengths” – the natural aspects of our game that provide us with a competitive edge over our opposition and which can be developed into a world’s best attribute. Mark takes his experience of working with England Cricket and as a backdrop to his speech where he examines what today’s athletes and elite teams are doing to get their performance edge. In particular, examining what allows individuals and teams to have the freedom to play to their natural strengths is an important consideration in achieving “performance leaps” both at a collective and individual level. As well as his interest in the mind, Mark is also a huge music fan and has an obsession with collecting 60’s/70’s vinyl and listening to Pink Floyd!

Mark Foster

Mark Foster burst onto the International swimming scene, at the age of 16, representing England at the 1986 Commonwealth Games. He then went on to represent his country for 23 years and became one of Britain’s most decorated male swimmers.

Throughout his remarkable career, Mark won 51 major international medals, competed in five Olympic games, was six times World Champion, eleven times European Champion, two times Commonwealth Champion and broke the World Record eight times.

Mark’s post swimming career has seen him reinvent himself as a successful motivational speaker. His relaxed and natural ability to engage with a variety of audiences, from all walks of life and about a wide range of subjects, makes him highly sort after. Recently Mark has begun working with Jim Rees the Ultra Cyclist and Executive Coach and together they founded The Long & The Short Of It. Their programme focuses on the mental and emotional discipline required for elite competition and applies these disciplines to the corporate workplace to improve performance. Mark has also been a regular blogger for the Huffington Post on current issues, sport and lifestyle and has co-written sports columns for several newspapers both in print and online.

Mark has also become a familiar face on television with his award winning partnership with Clare Balding from the aquatics centre during the Olympics in 2012, making him a household name. Since 2012 he has graced the TV screens with regular commentating slots at the Commonwealth and World Championships. More recently, Mark formed yet another popular media partnership commentating from the pool at the Rio Olympics with Rebecca Adlington and Helen Skelton. This high-energy partnership became one of the most popular commenting teams during the Rio Fortnight. Other TV appearances include: Countdown, Question of Sport, Come Dine With Me, Who’s Doing the Dishes, Celebrity Masterchef, The Chase as well as a host of other charity shows and campaigns such as Sports Relief and Dancing On Wheels.

Mark has always retained his passion for swimming and in May 2013, he set up The Mark Foster Swimming Academy. The Academy runs twice a year across the country and helps aspiring young swimmers from the ages of eleven to eighteen, improve their performance by applying an all-round fitness regime both in and out of the water. Aside from his work with the academy Mark also supports a number of charities including the International Children’s Trust, The Dogs Trust, Battersea Dogs Home, Sports Aid and is a patron of The Anaphylaxis Campaign, the UK charity for people with severe allergies. In addition, Mark mentored the swimmer James O’Shea to help him compete in the 2012 Para-Olympics.

Michel Roux Jr.

Michel Roux Jr was born in 1960 in Pembury, Kent, where his father Albert Roux worked as a private chef for the Cazalet family. His earliest food memories are the smells of the Fairlawne kitchen – pastry, sugar caramelizing and stews – where he played under the table while his father and mother Monique prepared the meals.

Michel Roux Jr. took over the kitchen at Le Gavroche in 1991 and remains the current head chef as of 2007. Under his stewardship, Le Gavroche has retained two Michelin stars and has been consistently placed in Restaurant’s Top 50.

Roux has made various television appearances, including on his friend Gordon Ramsay’s ITV1 produced ‘Hell’s Kitchen’, and as an expert judge on BBC2’s professional edition of ‘Masterchef’.

As a keynote speaker Michel shares with his audiences his personal story focusing on coping with the high pressure demands of a restaurateur balanced with a healthy lifestyle. His personal story of how he took on the family business and the extreme pressure he was under to maintain the quality and reputation the restaurant had generated under his father, makes for fascinating listening.

A lover of alcohol, Roux doesn’t drink between Monday and Friday, but enjoys Krug champagne on the weekend. He is an honorary member of Harlequin F.C. and is a keen marathon runner, completing his nineteenth marathon in 2014, to raise funds for VICTA, a charity supporting visually impaired children.

 

Mike Forde

Mike is particularly known for his innovative approach to create a sustained business model for elite player performance, in the most widely watched and competitive football league in the world.

He has a degree in Sport Science from Liverpool John Moores University and a Masters in Psychology and Sport from San Diego State University/Leeds Metropolitan University.

Mike was the Performance Director for Bolton Wanderers Football Club from 1999 to 2007. Following that, he spent six years as the Director of Football Operations at Chelsea Football Club, where he was responsible for all areas of performance and team operations. This included player recruitment, medical, sport science, psychology and performance analysis.

In May 2012 Chelsea achieved their long-held goal of winning the UEFA Champions League. They won the match in a dramatic penalty shoot-out, beating favourites Bayern Munich in their home stadium. In May 2013 Chelsea won the Europa League for the first time in their history.

Mike advises a variety of global sports and teams including 2014 NBA Champions San Antonio Spurs, where he assisted them in building a performance model for sustained success. He also consults closely on Corporate Knowledge Capture along with Sir Dave Brailsford and Team Sky Cycling.

Mike is the Co-Founder of the New York & London based Talent Agency ‘FC Talent’. He is a sought after expert in Performance and Talent Management discussions, valued for his elite experience and ability to impart and develop wide range learning, integration and best practice in High Performance Cultures and transfer to the world of business.