This week in our Tuesday morning meeting, where we get together as a team and just talk about stuff that’s going on, we were talking about women’s football (at least to begin with).
I was reflecting through the meetings about why these Tuesday morning meetings came about because we have this as a whole team between 9.10am and about 9.25am every Tuesday and it’s filmed and put-on Slack so that everybody can see it if they want to.
Interest and engagement in the meeting ebbs and flows (as you would expect) but they came to exist during and immediately after the pandemic when everybody felt the need to be able to talk to each other.
It’s become a bit of a habit and it’s become part of the culture of the practice and most of the time we just talk about ‘stuff’ and just as a team try to inspire ourselves and remind ourselves why we’re here and what we’re doing.
And so, one of the main points of conversation (apart from the fantastic news that our general manager, Lauren, is pregnant and the sad news that Beth, our hygienist, is moving along) was the women’s football.
I always try to reflect the stories back to us to make them as relevant as we can and the story of the success of women’s football and the success of the recent championships and the outstanding achievement that the England women’s football team have managed to secure almost needs no words.
But many people look at it as if it just happened today and of course that’s not the case.
What happened at Wembley on Sunday was a combination of decades of work and toil and hardship and barriers and projection and picking yourself up and trying to move along to a better place and I think that is the point of sport and I think that is the way things change.
We discussed the story in the meeting of the rugby 7’s at the Commonwealths which me and Callum and Grace and Grace’s boyfriend, Matt, were able to go to on Sunday night while the women’s football was on and the thing that I noticed was that the makeup of the South African rugby team has changed out of sight ethnically since the film Invictus was made and since the rugby world cup that brought fame to that whole story as a metaphor for the change in South Africa.
I totally realise that South Africa is not ‘fixed’ but show me a country that is, but the makeup of the team stood belting out the national anthem at Coventry stadium on Sunday and then went on to win the gold medal was entirely different to one that would have been present 25 years ago.
What I was struck with through this whole wonderful weekend and week of sport was Laura Kenny.
Laura Kenny is an absolute sporting icon in this country who first won an Olympic gold 10 years ago in the London velodrome where this week’s Commonwealth track cycling is being contested.
It’s fair to say Laura didn’t have quite the games that she’d hoped for, but she arrived at the games having suffered a miscarriage this year and then an ectopic pregnancy and didn’t really have any plans to be here because she thought she would be having another baby.
Laura is the wife of Jason Kenny and between them they’ve won more gold medals in cycling than many small countries.
It’s her interview though, after she won gold almost unexpectedly in the last session at the Commonwealth cycling.
It’s how she talks about normal things and normal challenges that confront her on a day-to-day basis, like those challenges confront all of us on a day-to-day basis who are just trying to be the best version they can whether that’s an athlete or a dentist or a mum or a friend or a husband.
At the commonwealth rugby as we were watching the incredible scenes play out, there was a p@*ck of a GP behind me talking all the time expressing his views of the world and why everybody was doing it wrong and talking about how sport had just become these stories of people overcoming adversity, one sob story after another (in his view).
Isn’t that what sport is and isn’t that why it is truly wonderful.
Listening to Laura Kenny in her interview here (click the link here to watch) is to gain inspiration from someone who’s reaching the very highest level of performance in spite of all the other challenges she has in her normal life.
If we can’t gain inspiration from stories and circumstances like this then where do we possibly find it from.
Blog Post Number - 3164
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