In our research, athletes in Belgium showed the lowest interest in entrepreneurship of the four partner countries, and their main motivation was a practical one: an extra income alongside something else. Their main barrier was a lack of time, cited by 60%. You can read more in our post on how the barriers differ by country.
The two Belgian stories in our training kit are both about timing: what you do in between, and when you start. The stories are built from public sources, and the athletes are not involved in the project.
Élodie Ouedraogo and Olivia Borlée: a brand from a frustration
Élodie Ouedraogo and Olivia Borlée ran in Belgium’s 4x100 metres relay team that took silver at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Eight years later the medal was upgraded to gold, which made them the first Belgian women to win Olympic gold in athletics. Their time, 42.54 seconds, is still the Belgian record.
Neither went straight into business. Ouedraogo retired in 2012 and worked in the editorial department of Elle Belgium. Borlée studied design. In 2016, when the gold was confirmed, they launched a clothing brand and named it after the record: 42|54.
The idea came from something they had lived with as athletes. Borlée has described how kit manufacturers imposed one look on everyone, so athletes tried to stand out through their hair or nails instead. The brand makes technical, fashion-minded activewear for women, with sustainable production at its centre. It won Emerging Talent of the Year at the 2018 Belgian Fashion Awards and showed in New York in 2019. The founders later renamed it UNRUN, after the race not yet run, with a campaign about inequality in sport.
The kit draws three lessons: take a step in between, build your product on what irritated you as an athlete, and treat a change of name as repositioning, not failure.
Kim Clijsters: an academy while the career was still open
Kim Clijsters reached world number one in singles and doubles in 2003 and won four Grand Slam singles titles. She retired three times, in 2007, 2012 and 2022. She opened the Kim Clijsters Academy in Bree, a small town in Limburg, in April 2014, between her second and third retirements. The business existed while she was still deciding whether her career was over.
Her aim was to bring everything a tennis player needs under one roof, and she staffed the academy partly with people from the team behind her Grand Slam years. It serves two markets at once: a programme for players aiming at a professional career, and a family sports club. The kit explains why: a large facility in a small town cannot live on elite players alone.
The kit’s lessons: a facility business needs a broad base, your support team is your first hiring pool, and starting a business does not require your sporting career to be definitively over.
Read the full stories
Both stories are in the training kit, with the hard part in detail, the sources for every fact and two reflection questions at the end of each.
ENTREMIND is an Erasmus+ Sport partnership co-funded by the European Union (project 101229842).
