Going for gold

Steve Ingham graduated in sports science in 1996 and in just two years was coming face to face with Olympic rowing legends Sir Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent. “It was a steep learning curve,” he said. “One minute you are looking at journal articles or case studies and the next you have a legend like Steve Redgrave towering over you and asking if you can make them go faster. It was very daunting.”

Steve obviously thrives on such baptisms of fire as he is now Head of Physiology at the English Institute of Sport (EIS) just as the country is gearing up to hosting the next Olympics.

Steve could only have dreamt of achieving such a position when he first became interested in sports science at school. At that time, British sport took a much less scientific approach.

He admits he flunked school and had to retake his GCSEs. Steve says he reached a pivotal point when he had to decide if he wanted to go on to higher education. He opted to do A-levels in sports studies, biology and chemistry and inspired by his biology teacher who was an exercise physiologist, he decided to do a Sport Science BSc(Hons) at the Chelsea School in Eastbourne, part of the University of Brighton.

He chose Brighton because the lecturers, “sold the vision and communicated it with real passion. Unlike other places I visited, the head of school and senior lecturers took time to answer my questions and to inspire potential students,” he said.

Even though he had been told there were unlikely to be any jobs working with athletes after he graduated, he knew that was what he wanted to do. He saw that several of the staff at Brighton balanced lecturing with working with athletes – the lecturing supporting the piecemeal and not so well paid work with athletes.

During his studies, Steve’s focus was always on the practical implementation of science so he would study a body part or physiological system and then go down to the gym or perform a hard training session to apply the knowledge. “It was about making the textbook come alive,” he said. “I didn’t just want to regurgitate the material; I wanted to be able to use it to improve performance.”

After graduating, he got a job teaching A-level students at his old college, Bournemouth and Poole College of Further Education. On the side, though, he worked as a consultant physiologist, with sports teams, athletes and the Bournemouth Heart Club.

In 1997, he got a job as a sports performance officer at the West Midlands Sports Council and became one of only 10 full-time sports scientists in the country. “It was a golden opportunity,” he said. By 1998, Steve, who has a PhD from the University of Surrey, was appointed Senior Sports Physiologist at the British Olympic Medical Centre, working in athletics, rowing and bobsleigh. It was there that he met  Redgrave and Pinsent. Although he had no experience of rowing, he says he threw himself into the job and consulted with the team’s coach on how to improve performance.

In 2003, Steve took on the role of Sports Science Manager at the Olympic Medical Institute, working towards the Athens Olympics as acclimatisation manager, before moving to the Loughborough University-based English Institute of Sport in 2005 as its Regional Lead Physiologist working with UK Athletics.

His current position as Head of Physiology, which he has held since last year, involves managing clusters of physiologists based around the EIS laboratories. “It’s one step away from hands-on delivery,” said Steve. It’s also about providing a vision, communicating the value of sports science and drawing in funds. Although the EIS has core funding for the 2012 Olympics, each sport controls its own funds and the EIS has to show it can deliver. Steve says it is already planning for post-2012 cutbacks and believes it can raise the necessary funds through enterprise and “originality of thought”.

He is quietly confident about the UK’s chances for medals in 2012, having been through four Olympic cycles and worked with over 40 Olympic or world medallists, currently with heptathletes Jessica Ennis and Kelly Southerton. He describes the work of a physiologist as quantifying an athlete’s capabilities, such as monitoring their heart rate and breathing, interpreting the information that emerges and using that to inform their training.

He says that their training must take into account their individual physiology to narrow their possibilities of making mistakes. He adds that the need to innovate is high. “Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith in using scientific research or basic biological principles with a particular athlete,” he said. “The research is usually done on Joe Public whereas many athletes have at least twice the capacity of the average person on the street. Athletes’ abilities astonish me on a daily basis – they are unique.”

He says Olympic preparation work is divided into four years: year one involves looking for new ideas; year two is about cementing those ideas and implementing them; year three is more to do with fine-tuning and year four is about reinforcing the strategy and reducing the possibility of failure. He thinks the UK is in a good position due to the way it has embraced sports science in the last decade and that “no other country has as much of a performance focus as we have”. While Australia pioneered the use of sports science in sport and the US takes quite a proactive approach, Steve says the UK has “unremittingly” focused on improving performance through science. “We had 70 medallists in Beijing. The day-to-day work we do is a bit like climbing a mountain. Occasionally you decide to take a different route to the top, but when you reach the summit and sit at the Olympics seeing athletes you have worked with achieve the pinnacle of sporting achievement in the form of a gold medal, that is incredibly motivating and fuels your work for the next four years,” he said.

He has returned to the University of Brighton a few times to talk about his work and is due back in November as part of the Chelsea Alumni Reunion 2010. He says the prospects for sports science students are better than when he was a student, although there is more competition given the numbers of graduates emerging. He is keen to inspire Brighton students to set their sights high. “When I was a student I found talks by outside speakers very inspiring and they acted as a spur to my own career,” he said. “I feel very privileged to be in a position to be able to give advice to the next generation.”
July 2010