Why Winter Olympians make good City entrepreneurs
Olympians and entrepreneurs have a lot in common. Both are highly driven in the pursuit of their goals and work tirelessly to achieve them. This is why many top-performing athletes turn to the world of start-ups and entrepreneurship when retiring from full-time sport.
High-performing individuals need to channel their energy into something, and when sport is no longer an option, entrepreneurship often becomes the vessel. Like high-level sport, founding a business takes commitment and sacrifice as well as a lot of resilience.
In 2016, I went from skiing competitively to setting up ski and snowboard instructor booking platform Maison Sport with fellow ski racers Olly Robinson and Nick Robinson. Nick and I had both competed for the British ski team and channelled the energy and commitment from our international racing years into building Maison Sport.
We identified a clear problem in the market and created a tech-forward platform designed to make personalised ski instruction easy to access.
This edge is evident across the business world. Take David Lloyd’s business success, for example: the former tennis player whose gym brand is now more widely recognised than his sporting career. Another inspiring athlete-turned-entrepreneur is Olympian Jessica Ennis-Hill, whose health and performance platform Jennis has become a recognised voice in women’s fitness and wellbeing.
But which characteristics of top athletes translate to the business world and take success from the podium to the boardroom?
Relentless discipline
Our early mornings, repetitive drills, strict routines and long-term commitment were forged through years of elite sport. That environment set the gold standard for discipline long before we started building businesses.
Entrepreneurship demands the same grind. We are already conditioned to trust the process even when progress is invisible because that mindset was embedded through years of training and competition.
Olympians learn from failure
Our journeys as athletes were shaped as much by failure as success. Missed qualifications, injuries and lost races were unavoidable and they taught us that failure was never an endpoint – it was feedback.
Building a business involves false starts, slow traction and ideas that do not land. We are equipped to absorb setbacks without losing confidence, learn quickly and adjust course.
Goal-setting under pressure
We learned early how to break long-term ambitions into daily measurable objectives. Race preparation required years of planning where a single performance could define the outcome.
Entrepreneurship brings similar pressure – investor pitches, product launches and pivotal decisions where execution matters.
Coachability and learning mindset
We never succeeded alone. Olympic performance depended on close collaboration with coaches, nutritionists, physiotherapists and analysts, with constant feedback loops.
That openness to coaching now underpins how we build companies. We actively seek input from mentors, advisors, investors and customers knowing that progress comes from listening, adapting and improving.
Entrepreneurs and accountability
Even in individual sports we were part of multi-layered teams. Accountability was never just about personal performance but about how our actions affected everyone, contributing to a shared ambition.
Olympian Andy Murray is a clear example. His pursuit of an Olympic medal required not only elite performance but deep trust alignment and accountability within his training team leading into London 2012.
As founders we are accountable for setting that direction, inspiring belief and taking responsibility when things go wrong. When channelled effectively the leadership goal-setting and accountability developed through elite sport translate directly into business success.
At Maison Sport we have applied these principles to become Europe’s leading ski lesson booking platform and achieve a 40 per cent increase in total revenue for the 2024-25 season.
Experiences shape how we think about leadership in business. From an early stage athletes are encouraged to think big – Olympic medals, world titles and podiums often feel unrealistic at the start of a career yet they provide a clear long-term target. That same mindset applies in entrepreneurship too.