Sarah Winckless is a Great British Olympic bronze medallist and double World Champion.

Sarah Winckless has represented Great Britain in rowing at three Olympic Games and seven World Championships. She is an athletic all rounder, with an England Vest for discus throwing and Cambridge Blues in netball, basketball, athletics and rowing. Upon leaving university she decided to focus on one sport and became a key player in the development of the Great Britain Woman’s rowing team during the last twelve years.

During her early teens, Sarah’s life was impacted by a change in her mother whose behaviour became strange and erratic; she was prone to mood swings and seemed to lose the natural grace of her movements. Sarah’s mother was diagnosed with Huntingdon’s disease.

Although now in a wheelchair and severely disabled, her mother has been an inspiration, fighting each step of the disease for a long as possible. In 1997 Sarah was tested and discovered she also carries the Huntingdon’s gene. This means at some stage she will develop the disease. Currently well, but always facing this uncertain future, Sarah approaches life and its challenges with a hugely positive attitude.

Speaking

Sarah has an ability to connect with her audiences and has delivered speeches to a wide range of groups including businesses, sports clubs, charities and schools. Recent examples include;

•    After dinner speaking for BestInvest at their 120 strong client dinner

•    Inspiring 450 women at a charity lunch

•    Speaking to an autistic school

•    Motivating 100 talented youngsters for the Youth Sport Trust

•    Presenting to industry experts at the HLST conference

•    Speaking at the Scottish Families Huntingdon's Conference


Sarah is able to present in a wide range of styles, including after dinner speaking, formal talks, multi media presentations and interactive physical challenges.

National Media on Sarah Winckless

The Times - April 27th 2009 Olympic Medallist Faces Uncertain Future

The Telegraph - April 27th 2009 Sarah Winckless Calls Time On A Glittering Career

The Times - April 29th 2009 S arah Winckless disease proves sport really does matter

To book or enquire about having Sarah speak at your event please contact Pro-Motivate in London.

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Media Copy - The Times April 29th 2009 - Matthew Syed, Sports Journalist of the Year

Sarah Winckless disease proves sport really does matter

Anyone who read these pages on Monday will have been moved by the story of Sarah Winckless, the two-times world champion rower who retired last week. Winckless is, by any reckoning, a remarkable woman: a stalwart of the all-conquering Great Britain team, an Olympic medal-winner and a Cambridge graduate in chemistry. She also happens to carry the mutant gene for Huntington's disease.

Huntington's is one of nature's more vindictive illnesses, a neurological condition for which there is no known cure. The earliest symptoms are a general lack of co-ordination, but as the disease advances, jerky body movements become more apparent, as does a decline in mental abilities and behavioural and psychiatric problems. Physical abilities are gradually lost until full-time care becomes necessary and the decline in mental abilities typically results in dementia.

Winckless, who had the disease diagnosed 11 years ago, has yet to suffer any symptoms, but has first-hand knowledge of the kind of future she faces, having witnessed the slow deterioration of her mother.

Her mother can barely speak now, but before the illness fully took hold she called Winckless “Sarah Rowing”, her waning memory linking her elder daughter with the thing she is most famous for. The physical symptoms of the disorder can start at any age, but the average is between 35 and 44. Winckless is 35. Today she is at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge having the latest of her regular tests to determine whether the disease has kicked in. “They may see some early signs of things starting to go wrong,” she said.

It is common when confronting such stories to say something along the lines of “well, that certainly puts sport into perspective”; to throw one's hands up in the air and acknowledge that supporting a football team or whacking a ping-pong ball or rowing a boat is, when all is said and done, trivial; to spend a moment or two in silent incredulity that we get so animated, passionate, elated and downright uptight about these strange, artificial, man-made distractions otherwise known as rugby, cricket, golf, snooker and the like.

Tonight thousands will descend upon Old Trafford to watch 22 men attempting to kick a pig's bladder ball between two sticks. The Theatre of Dreams will reverberate, as it so often does on European nights, to the collective desires and anxieties of two sets of fans and the towering ambitions of the principals on the pitch. For 90 minutes we will be enraptured, engaged and, even those of us who support neither team, impassioned. We will care deeply about the result. And yet.

Does it really matter? In the grand scheme of things? When all is said and done? When living under the shadow of mortality and illness, like Winckless?

Well, yes, actually. You see, I don't buy into this “sport does not really matter” mantra. Sure, it is philosophical, existentialist and contemplative to say such a thing, but I also think it entirely misses the point. Sport does matter. It matters whether we have Huntington's or not; it matters whether we are months away from death or not; it matters whether we are in love or not; it matters whether we are philosophically minded or not.

Winckless, you may or may not be surprised to hear, feels the same way. Towards the end of that fascinating interview, she reveals that she did not retire from rowing because of her condition, nor because the window on her life is likely to close earlier than most. Rather, she retired because she was bumped by a younger, slightly faster rower called Katherine Grainger. She retired because she could not compete at London 2012 in the single sculls, the event she had set her heart on. She retired because she was unable to fulfil her lifetime ambition of winning Olympic gold.

Here are her words explaining why she yearned to row the single scull at London 2012: “I needed something that really scared me to give me that motivation. When I race the single I can get so scared that I have to remind myself to breathe and that's quite exciting. At 38 [for London 2012], it would be old to win your first Olympic gold, but I was willing to give it a go.”

Had Winckless been selected, she would not have stopped rowing any more than she would have stopped breathing. Having lost her chance to compete in London, she will go to Africa with her boyfriend to achieve a rather different sporting ambition: climbing Kilimanjaro.

I am pretty sure that if I were in Winckless's place, I would do precisely the same. I would engage in more sport, not less. I would watch more great sport, not less. I would become more deeply involved in table tennis, my favourite sport, not less. And I also suspect that sport - along with all the many other things that make life meaningful - would become more urgent, more exciting, more viscerally intense. Why on earth should bad news or the bad things in life rob the good things of their meaning?

But is not football, to go back to our earlier terminology, merely kicking a bladder between two sticks? Is not table tennis merely whacking a plastic ball over a net? Well, if you insist on seeing things in such terms, yes.

But we can play this reductionist game with anything. Sex, as Richard Dawkins often reminds us, is “merely” gene propagation; love is “merely” hard-wired emotion; beauty is “merely” the reworking of retinal images. Just because we can explain or describe a thing, does this mean we, by implication, trivialise it?

Every morning at this newspaper, the departmental heads get around a conference table to discuss the running order for the next day's paper. All the bigwigs are there: home news, foreign, business, comment, you name it. One by one the various editors read out their running orders based upon breaking stories, who is being commissioned to write them, how they are going to be presented, etc. The stories are always big and meaty: today's will doubtless include swine flu, more job losses, fighting in Pakistan and the like.

Then it will be the sports editor's turn. He will not talk about matters of life and death; rather, he will talk about the resurgence of Arsenal and Cesc Fàbregas; about the attacking possibilities open to Manchester United with players such as Wayne Rooney, Cristiano Ronaldo and Dimitar Berbatov to choose from; about the collision of two of the most attractive and crusading teams in football and why it has the makings of a classic.

Nobody will suffer, perish or lose their jobs at Old Trafford tonight, but does that make the events that will unfold there any less meaningful? Or would we rather say that life has to be lived and breathed to have any meaning at all?

Ryan Giggs talked this week about the goal - against Arsenal in the 1999 FA Cup semi-final replay - that will always define his career. “When you score an important goal, you have no control,” he said. Giggs is not the most eloquent of souls, but we all know - at least those of us who play and watch sport - what he meant. That glorious, life-affirming loss of control that takes place - on the pitch, in the stands and in living rooms - whenever sport reaches a climax. Whenever the action hits fever pitch. Whenever the drama attains its apotheosis.

You call that trivial? Winckless, for one, would beg to differ.

Sarah Winckless is patron of the Scottish Huntingdon's Association

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To book or enquire about having Sarah speak at your event please contact Pro-Motivate in London.