Ollie Phillips’ Life After Rugby: A journey from ‘undiagnosable’ pain to tackling the world’s most ‘demanding oceans’

It was the end of the 2010-11 season and Stade Francais wing Ollie Phillips was on a roll.

Named World Sevens Player of the Year in 2009 and Top 14 Overseas Player of the Year for 2011, Phillips was the top try scorer that season and had been talking to Martin Johnson about a return to Test rugby with England. Things could hardly have been going better.

But Phillips was also struggling with a niggling knee injury, one of those that simply refuses to yield to physiotherapy or medicine.

In an interview on behalf of eToro, the official investing and trading partner of Premiership Rugby, Phillips tells us how that was the beginning of the end of his rugby career – but how his life after rugby has turned out to be equally as fulfilling.

Sweating the Asset

“Michael Cheika was our head coach (at Stade Francais) at the time,” Phillips says.

“Cheik was a tough man and a great coach, but boy, he liked to sweat his player assets. My knee was gradually getting worse, but with Michael virtually promising an extended contract as a reward, I battled through.

“I played 33 games out of 35, playing off injections and willpower, and things were not getting better in terms of my knee.

“I guess I started to feel a little disenfranchised.

“It was at the time when the owner, Max Guazzini, was going through his very public financial issues. The club, and by proxy, my contract, was unstable. I heard that Cheik wasn’t going to offer me a contract as he’d promised, and there were rumours that Paul Sackey had been slated to replace me.

“In the background, I’d been speaking to Johnno about England. I’d got 80-odd caps for England Sevens; I’d done everything I could in short form and I wanted to take my Sevens game into the full Test arena.

“But Martin was already getting flak for selecting a lot of French-based players – Tom Palmer, James Haskell and a few others, so he was adamant that, for me, someone without the profile of the others, the only route into the Elite England squad was to return to the Premiership.”

Beginning of the end

The only trouble was, his knee was now in such a bad state that he needed surgery – and that meant missing the first half of the next season.

Stade Francais turned their back on him, and suddenly he was without a club and recovering from a major operation.

Fortunately, his form for Stade Francais in 2010-11 was so good that Phillips was not short of offers to return to rugby once fit again.

He signed for Gloucester in January 2012, earmarked to fill the gap left by the injured Olly Morgan, and had been persuaded by Ben Ryan to keep playing for England Sevens with the 2014 Commonwealth Games and 2016 Rio Olympics on the horizon.

But Phillips would soon discover that his own injury problems had not disappeared.

“I loved Stade, and the Stade faithful had a soft spot for this mad Englishman on the wing!” Phillips says.

“But Cheik didn’t want me – and that hurt given I’d played on one leg for the guy when I really shouldn’t have. I needed a knee operation and that meant six months off.

“Bryan Redpath at Gloucester was anxious to sign me – Olly Morgan was struggling with injuries, and I was a drop-in – if only I could get fit.

“Ben Ryan, now England Sevens supremo, was also courting me, dangling the carrots of the 2014 Commonwealth Games and, the big one, the Rio Olympics, something that I admit really attracted me.

“I was fully invested and eager to get going. But things were not right.

“I was running in training, something quite innocuous, and my leg tightened up. It was something between cramp and a pull kind of feel.

“And from that moment, I kept getting the strangest, and completely undiagnosable, leg injuries down my hamstring, through my knee and into my calf.

“I was struggling to meet the fitness goals that Ben Ryan and England wanted and demanded. I was in a race against time and I was running it on one leg.”

Life after rugby

Despite his injury issues, like many players, Phillips had never given too much thought to what would come after retirement.

Fortunately for him, not long after one phone call sounded the death knell on his playing career, another came in that assured him there was indeed life after rugby.

“I was playing a game of touch in a closed-door training session against Fiji and my leg just stopped working. It was bizarre,” Phillips says.

“The best way I could describe it is that it felt my leg was no longer mine. That it refused to obey me or my commands – it was like having someone else’s limb attached to you. It didn’t respond to any form of diagnosis or treatment, and it was threatening my career.

“The medics believed it was a neural issue. Something had gone wrong in how my neutral system communicated with my limbs, but nobody had a clue how to sort it.

“As if it couldn’t get any worse, that day fell into a further downward spiral. Ben rang me: “Sorry Ollie,” he said. “But I have to move on. I can’t gamble on your fitness and we can’t continue on hope and a prayer. It’s over with us.”

“There I was. No contract. No leg. No future. I was f*cked.

“The night was awful. I had no visible income, I had no idea what I wanted to do, I’d lost my dream of Rio, my career and my self-esteem all in one day. I was 29 at the time and I’d gone from being 2009 World Sevens Player of the Year and 2011 Top 14 Player of the Year and top try scorer to it being over in two years.

“I sat at home, grumpy and depressed. And as I did so, the phone rang and a jolly voice at the other end announced it was Sir Robin Knox-Johnson.

“Ollie,” Sir Robin said. “Fancy sailing a clipper around the world for eleven months?!

“Now I’d been vaguely involved in a bit of charitable work for The Alzheimer’s Society, but Sir Robin saw this trip as more of a trade mission than a charity fundraiser.

“It was called The GREAT Boat – it was all about promoting Britain as a great place to trade, to visit and to live. We would be racing, twelve matched boats, racing across the world’s most demanding oceans, but at the same time we were advocates for the British brand, a project to build on the legacy of London 2012, and to encourage trade links.

“They wanted me to act as a trade envoy, a schmoozer if you like! My job was to get the hosts engaged in the GB story, partly using my Sevens as a hook, partly using the boat as a hook.

“But at the same time, I was also sailing a massive yacht and I’d had no idea what I was doing other than a bit of stuff I’d done with the Clipper on the Solent.

“To compound matters, I had one working leg. All I needed was a parrot on my shoulder and I’d have been the caricature seaman!

“When Robin said, ‘We’re going in five weeks’, my immediate reaction was ‘I’m bloody well struggling to walk!’

Self-Investment

But I’d spent some really frustrating time trying to limp around a rugby pitch. I knew, in my heart, that things were close to terminal in terms of my sporting career. I knew it was a time for self-investment and new learning.

“Did I make that decision consciously? I am not sure I did, but I knew this was an opportunity to spend 11 months investing in my future, and crucially, I knew that it was relatively low risk – hurricanes and typhoons at sea apart!

“I trained as hard as I could for three weeks aboard a Clipper training yacht. In the meantime, England offered me some rehab, which helped, but still there was no sign of a contract so my mind was made up.

“My motto was simple: Look at the upside of every downside. And don’t let desperation drive poor decision-making.

“Self-honesty is key here – I knew, bluntly, I was f*cked and that was disappointing, but this was exciting.

“And, despite an initially frosty reception from the crew, who had no idea why they were spending 11 months with a limping public schoolboy who’d done nothing but chase eggs all his life, it was one of my best-ever personal decisions.

“At sea, you learn real leadership under the pressure of a confined and at times boring environment. You learn how to get the very best out of each other and it furthered my leadership learning no end.

“Key to this was demonstrating value – I’d do anything, however menial, to demonstrate my teamship.

“By this time, I’d even grown a pirate beard, and then, on a whim, decided to promote GB by having a full Union Jack dye job on it.”

PwC and the Dock

Remarkably, as the red-white-and-blue-bearded ex-rugby player sailed around the world, Phillips would have a conversation that led to the next stage of his career, as a director for PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

His mindset to learn and to invest into himself was key. Allied with the leadership and teamwork skills he developed during his rugby career, not to mention his willingness to say yes, Phillips stayed true to his motto to find the upside of every downside.

“On board our GREAT boat was a fellow crewmate who happened to be a senior partner at PwC, a large global consultancy,” Phillips says.

“Michael Rendell was his name. A lovely chap who was taking a sabbatical to live his sailing dream and to promote the business, by sailing one leg of the race from Cape Town to Australia.

“We got on great, and I learned a lot about business. We promised to stay in touch and I thought that was it.

“The trip made memories of a lifetime. My self-investment, however, was somewhat esoteric. I’d learned a lot but made little money, something that was starting to worry me. The Clipper was sailing home and I needed to get my backside into gear.

“As we docked in St Katherine’s, off the Thames under Tower Bridge, weary and celebrating our final ever moments together, a familiar face met me on the side of the Dock.

“It was Michael Rendell. He bellowed at me, ‘Ollie, you need a job. You’re one of the best and most natural leaders I’ve encountered. PwC could do with you. Come and work for us.’

“Michael was so excited – he was virtually waving a contract under my nose and he was really persuasive – not that I needed much of that. I snapped his offer up and the rest is history!

“In closing, I look back upon that turning point as a real moment of change. One driven by my awareness to self-invest and to take the right strategy to get the right outcome.

“Best of all, I don’t look back with anger or frustration much these days. There were times when I sat there and said, ‘Why me?” Why am I injured?’

“But looking at the upside of a potential downside was key – and I don’t regret the way it turned out one iota!”

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