The Case for Mental Fitness: Olympic Silver Medallist Samantha Murray on Surviving Elite Sport

1. Can you describe a moment where you felt your whole career balance on something as small as a fall, a false start, or an injury?

Thankfully, I never had a fall from a horse or a false start, so for me that moment wasn't necessarily something physical going wrong. I did witness enough falls from the horse and false starts from the swimming starting blocks – just had control in those very physical moments in sport. For me, it was standing on the start line for the final event of a modern pentathlon, knowing that what happened next could determine whether I stood on a podium or walked away with nothing.

I was a strong and very consistent fencer. My swimming was considered among the best in the world, I was consistent in the equestrian, and I knew I could run fast and hold a strong pace. But ultimately, so much came down to my shooting.

I can still remember running into the shooting range and experiencing what felt like that fight-or-flight moment. I had to control what I used to think of as my inner demon ( I called it the self-destruct mode) or what Dr Steve Peters describes as the “inner chimp” and somehow remain brave, present and completely focused on the process.

Sometimes I could control it. Sometimes the nerves and anxiety won, and I missed. That was probably the biggest battle of my sporting career because the margins were so unforgiving. How I performed on that shooting range could ultimately determine whether I stood on the podium at the end of the day or stood off it.

I poured hours into sports psychology trying to master that response: essentially trying to train my brain so that when I reached that moment of fight or flight, I could make a different choice.

That's what people don't necessarily see about elite sport. The margin between winning and losing can be incredibly small, but sometimes that margin isn't physical at all. It's a battle taking place entirely inside your own head, in a matter of seconds.

2. Did you ever compete injured because the cost of pulling out felt higher than the cost of the injury itself? What went through your mind in that moment?

No, I was never really in a position where I had to weigh up a serious physical injury against my longer-term health and decide to compete anyway.

In my sport, injuries were more likely to come through an unfortunate accident, which thankfully I largely avoided, or through the cumulative effect of training load, recovery, nutrition, sleep and simply asking an enormous amount of your body over many years.

I developed tendinopathy in my left Achilles towards the latter part of my career. I remember the sports doctor saying to me at the time that, as you accumulate years of elite training, those little niggles can start to appear. He had worked across numerous Olympic Games and with incredible athletes throughout his career, so that comment stayed with me.

I think I was about 25.

That sounds incredibly young in normal life, but it was the first time I really understood how short an elite sporting career can be. At London 2012, I was only 22. You give an enormous amount to sport at an age when most people are only beginning to work out who they are and what they want from life.

So, while I don't think physical injury was the greatest threat to my longer-term health, the cumulative mental load of elite sport is something I reflect on much more now.

I moved from Lancashire to Bath at 18 and rarely went home because training and competition were completely immersive and year-round. I was a young woman in a coaching environment where all my coaches were men, considerably older than me (55+), and the culture at the time was very different to the conversations we're having around athlete welfare today.

Every day was about improvement, which meant every day involved criticism and feedback. Some of it was incredibly personal: your body composition, whether you were lean enough, the weaknesses in your technique, what you had done wrong in competition and what needed rebuilding.

And then there was another unusual dynamic in modern pentathlon. We competed internationally as individuals but trained together as the British squad. So, the people beside you every day were your teammates, but they were also potentially the people standing between you and Olympic selection.

That creates a level of intensity that is difficult to switch off from.

It isn't an injury you can see on an MRI or put a cast around, but it creates a significant mental load. You're constantly being assessed, constantly trying to improve and constantly aware that somebody alongside you wants the same limited Olympic place that you do.

That's why I tend to talk about “mental fitness” rather than just mental health. You needed to train your ability to withstand that environment in much the same way as you trained your body.

By the time I retired, I remember feeling genuinely ready to step away. I needed space and distance from a world that had consumed almost every part of my life for around a decade.

So, my answer is no: I never had that dramatic moment of choosing a competition over a serious injury. But I do think elite sport asks athletes to make a different trade-off every day: how much of your physical and mental capacity are you prepared to give to pursuing something extraordinary?

3. You once said that after winning silver that “everyone thinks you have failed”; if you’re not on the podium again. Can you unpack what that pressure felt like day today?

I had to chuckle when I read that quote now, because I look back as a 36-year-old and think: honestly, nobody really cared that much how I performed. I was my own biggest critic.

I think that quote tells you far more about the mindset of the young woman I was then than it does about anybody else's expectations of me. I didn't have the perspective or perhaps the tools to manage pressure and anxiety that we talk about much more openly today. I was incredibly harsh on myself.

But there was also a practical reason why performance felt so important. From around the age of 19, I benefited from elite athlete funding, which effectively became my salary and enabled me to pursue sport full-time. Without that financial support, I'm not sure I could have been an elite athlete.

So, I felt this constant need to justify my existence in sport. I would watch friends graduate from university and start careers in London and around the world, while I was continuing with this quite unusual life as a full-time athlete. I loved my sport and it brought me enormous joy, but in my mind, if I was going to make that choice rather than begin a conventional career, I had to justify it by winning medals.

I remember a coach saying to me when I was about 20: “You're on the climb now. But once you get there, you have to sustain being there, because once you start dropping down, there's only one way out.” That stayed with me.

After winning Olympic silver, I felt I had reached that level, so now I had to prove repeatedly that I belonged there. A season without medals wasn't simply disappointing to me; I worried about what it meant for my funding and whether continuing as an athlete was still a reasonable life choice.

What's interesting is that I look at athletes now who have real ebbs and flows in performance. They might go a season or two without winning and then come back and achieve something extraordinary. I sometimes wonder whether I could ever have given myself that same permission. I don't think I could.

And perhaps that's one reason I retired at 28 rather than allowing my career to continue into my thirties. Modern pentathlon demanded an enormous amount physically and mentally, and our competitive season effectively ran from February through to August. In many Olympic sports, there also isn't another professional league you can drop into and continue earning a living in the way you might in football.

For me, it felt very binary: you're in, you're performing, you're funded or eventually it's game over. Looking back, I don't necessarily wish I'd approached it differently. That intensity was probably part of what made me successful. But I can recognise now that the pressure I thought was coming from everybody else was, to a very large extent, coming from me.

And that's probably the biggest difference perspective gives you.

4. What happens, practically and financially, to an athlete who has one bad season at the wrong time? Who absorbs that risk, the athlete, the federation, or sponsors?

It really depends on the sport, because different federations, funding structures and commercial contracts all have their own nuances. But in my experience as a British Olympic athlete in modern pentathlon, ultimately the greatest risk sat with the athlete.

I was a professional athlete from 2009 until I retired in 2018, and the high-performance environment I experienced then was very different from the one athletes operate in today.

My UK Sport funding was fundamental to my ability to train full-time. Winning an Olympic or World Championship medal gave me a degree of funding security, but my position was still reviewed annually. That created a very clear understanding: ultimately, we were there to win medals.

At the time, I experienced the system as quite cutthroat. Your coach and performance director had enormous influence over your funding, selection and therefore your ability to continue your career. As a very young athlete, I felt vulnerable and, at times, disposable. I certainly didn't feel that the athlete voice carried the weight that it does today.

That creates a culture where you become very conscious of keeping the people making those decisions happy. Looking back, I don't think that power dynamic was particularly healthy.

Towards the end of my career, I remember getting engaged and then being pulled aside at training by our performance director. I was told, in effect, that people generally don't get engaged and married unless they're planning to have children, and that having children wasn't something the programme would be able to support me with.

I remember that conversation very clearly because it demonstrated how little separation there could be between your sporting career and your personal life. I was an adult woman making a completely normal life decision, but I felt that even that could potentially affect how my future as an athlete was viewed.

I think it's important, though, to put my experience in the context of its time. Athlete welfare in British high-performance sport has evolved enormously since I retired in 2018. Today there are mechanisms including exceptional-circumstances funding, medical support and financial assistance for athletes facing unexpected difficulties. We've also had major investigations and reviews across British sport that have forced difficult conversations about athlete welfare, safeguarding and the balance of power between athletes and those responsible for their careers.

My commercial experience was very different. I had fantastic relationships with sponsors and partners, with contracts negotiated professionally through my agency. I worked with brands including BMW, Brooks Running and Aldi, alongside other commercial partnerships and corporate speaking, and those were overwhelmingly positive experiences.

So when you ask who absorbs the risk, I would say the athlete ultimately does.

A federation continues. A sponsor has a portfolio of athletes and properties. But an athlete has one body, one career and a relatively short window in which to make it work.

The difference today is that we're much more willing to ask whether being successful in elite sport has to mean making the athlete feel quite so vulnerable in the process.

5. How would you describe healthy competitiveness vs the one that starts eating an athlete alive?

I think healthy competitiveness is when you're driven by the challenge: you want to improve, you want to win, and you're excited by seeing how good you can become.

I loved that part of sport. I loved training, I loved learning and I loved the feeling of mastering something that I hadn't been able to do before. Competition gave all of that work a purpose.

The unhealthy side begins, I think, when the result starts determining how you feel about yourself. For me, there was also a particularly complicated dynamic in modern pentathlon. We competed internationally as individuals but trained every day as the British squad. So, the women beside me were my teammates and some of my closest friends (at times…), but they were also my direct competition for a very limited number of Olympic places.

That can create quite a strange psychological environment. You want your teammates to do well, but their success can potentially threaten your own selection, funding or position within the squad. When you're young and completely immersed in that world, it can become very difficult to separate the two.

Healthy competitiveness says: she's performing well, so I need to raise my level.

Unhealthy competitiveness says: her success means something about my value.

And I think that's when it starts eating you alive, because there is always somebody performing better somewhere. There is always another result, another ranking, another selection and another weakness to fix.

I recognise now that I put an enormous amount of pressure on myself. At the time, I thought that was simply what being an elite athlete required. To some extent it probably was that relentless drive was part of what got me onto an Olympic podium.

But there must be an ability to switch it off.

If you can walk away from training or competition and still know who you are outside your result, competitiveness can be an incredibly positive force. When you can't; when winning becomes validation and losing starts to feel like a judgement on you as a person, I think that's when the relationship with elite sport becomes much more dangerous.

Perhaps the healthiest athletes aren't necessarily the ones who want it less. They're the ones who can want it desperately without allowing the outcome to define them.

6. You’ve watched elite sport evolve since you retired. What’s your read on why athletes and federations are increasingly drawn to places like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar?

I think there are several reasons, and obviously money is part of the conversation. It would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

An elite sporting career is incredibly short. Athletes know they have a limited window in which to perform, earn and create some financial security from something they may have spent most of their lives pursuing.

So, if you're offered the opportunity to compete in a world-class environment, against the best athletes, with excellent facilities and meaningful prize money, I completely understand why that is attractive. If those opportunities had existed at the same scale when I was competing, would I have considered them? Absolutely.

But I think it's far too simplistic to explain the Gulf's attraction purely through money. Sport is part of a much bigger strategic ambition here. Saudi Vision 2030 has placed sport within a wider transformation encompassing quality of life, participation, economic development and international competition. The UAE's National Sports Strategy 2031 similarly looks at everything from community participation and talent identification to developing sports professionals, elite performance and building a global identity for Emirati sport.

That long-term commitment creates opportunities not only for athletes, but for the people running sport. I work as a sports adviser here in the region, and I regularly speak to sports executives and professionals I originally knew in the UK who are now working in the Gulf. One of the things they consistently describe as refreshing is the change in mindset.

In the UK and Europe, many had become accustomed to conversations about limited budgets, reducing costs and what couldn't be done. Here, they describe being asked a very different question: what could we build?

For federations, that's attractive. Sport needs investment, but it also needs people willing to think ambitiously about infrastructure, events, participation, talent pathways, technology, media and the fan experience.

And for athletes, I think the proposition is increasingly compelling too. They're not simply competitors anymore. They have their own audiences, platforms and commercial identities. Competing in the Gulf can introduce them to new markets and fan bases while offering high-quality sporting opportunities.

There are, of course, legitimate debates around the Gulf's growing influence in global sport, and those shouldn't be dismissed. But I think it's important to look at the breadth of what is actually being built.

This isn't simply about bringing famous athletes or major events to the region. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have explicitly set out national strategies to increase participation, develop talent, strengthen sporting institutions and improve elite performance. That's where the longer-term story becomes interesting.

It's one thing to bring the world's best athletes here to compete. It's another if that investment simultaneously builds sporting industries, develops local expertise, creates opportunities for home-grown athletes and makes sport a bigger part of everyday life.

Having experienced elite sport as an athlete and now seeing this next chapter from within the region, I understand the attraction. Athletes want to go where they feel valued and can compete at the highest level. Sports professionals want to go where they have the resources and permission to build. Right now, the Gulf is offering both.

7. Do you think the Gulf’s investment could ease that brutality for athletes, with better safety nets, medical support, and financial security around injury?

Yes, I think it could but I don't think money alone creates a healthier sporting system.

What the Gulf has at the moment is an opportunity to build some of these systems at a time when our understanding of athlete welfare is much more sophisticated than it was when I entered elite sport.

When I became a professional athlete in 2009, the performance environment I experienced was very much built around one objective: winning medals. Athlete welfare existed, of course, but we weren't having the same conversations we're having today about mental fitness, safeguarding, financial security, athlete voice or what happens to somebody when they're injured and unable to perform.

If you're building or rapidly expanding sporting systems now, you have the benefit of everything elite sport has learnt since then.

And the Gulf also has the resources to think ambitiously about what athlete support could look like. Qatar, for example, has invested significantly in sports medicine and rehabilitation. Saudi Arabia is developing its elite-athlete programmes as part of Vision 2030, and across the region there is enormous investment going into facilities, expertise and sporting infrastructure.

8. What would a genuinely healthier model of elite sport look like to you, one that doesn’t treat injury or a bad season as a career death sentence?

I don't think a healthier model means removing pressure or guaranteeing an athlete funding indefinitely regardless of performance. Elite sport is competitive by definition. There are finite places, finite resources and ultimately you are there to perform.

But I do think we can create more humanity around that reality. For me, a healthier model would give athletes a little more security through the inevitable ebbs and flows of a sporting career. One injury or one bad season shouldn't necessarily undo ten years of evidence about an athlete's potential and capability.

There needs to be room for context. Why has performance dropped? Is the athlete injured? Are they recovering from something? Is there something happening in their personal life? Do they need a different coaching environment? And importantly, what does the athlete themselves think they need?

That athlete voice is fundamental. Looking back at my own career, I think one of the biggest changes I would make is giving athletes more agency over the decisions that affect their lives. When somebody else controls your selection, funding, coaching programme and ultimately whether you can continue earning a living from your sport, there is an enormous imbalance of power.

A healthier system should still hold athletes accountable, but athletes should also be able to question decisions, challenge an environment that isn't working for them and ask for help without fearing that doing so could count against them.

I'd also like to see greater financial and medical security around injury. Injury is an occupational hazard of elite sport. If we ask somebody to push their body to its limits in pursuit of medals, there should be a reasonable safety net when that body inevitably needs time to recover.

And I think we have to prepare athletes for life beyond sport much earlier. When I was competing, everything was about the next training session, the next competition, the next Olympic cycle. But an athlete's sporting career can end very suddenly, while their adult life is only just beginning.

Encouraging education, professional development and interests outside sport isn't a distraction from performance. I actually think it can make an athlete more resilient because their entire identity and financial future aren't resting on what happens in one competition.

Perhaps most importantly, we need to stop confusing a healthy sporting environment with a comfortable one. Elite sport shouldn't always be comfortable. Training is hard. Losing hurts. Selection is brutal. Competition creates pressure. Those things are part of pursuing excellence and, personally, I wouldn't want to remove them.

The question is whether the environment around the athlete makes those pressures sustainable. For me, the healthiest model isn't one where athletes are protected from failure. It's one where they're allowed to fail, recover, learn and come back; without believing that one difficult season means their career, income or identity disappears with it.