In our research, Polish athletes had the strongest athletic identity of the four partner countries, and their main barrier was the fear of losing money, cited by just over half. The report’s suggestion was to present a business as a backup plan that lowers risk, not as a bet. You can read more in our post on how the barriers differ by country.
The three Polish stories in our training kit fit that advice well. In all three, the next career was under construction before the sporting one ended. The stories are built from public sources, and the athletes are not involved in the project.
Anna Lewandowska: the audience came first
Anna Lewandowska took up karate at 11, competed for 11 years and won 38 medals at Polish, European and world championships. While she was still competing, she finished two diplomas at the University of Physical Education in Warsaw, one in sports management and one in nutrition.
Her business began with a blog, Healthy Plan by Ann, which built an audience around a practical approach to health and nutrition. The blog grew into diet plans, workout programmes, an app and books, and a second brand, Foods by Ann, makes food products. Her official site says she now runs five businesses in the well-being sector.
The kit reads it as a case of audience first, product second, and its lesson is to start a qualification before you need it.
Mariusz Pudzianowski: a haulage firm that started early
Mariusz Pudzianowski won the World’s Strongest Man title five times, the most in the competition’s history, and moved to mixed martial arts in 2009. He founded his transport company in 1997, years before his strongman career peaked. Today it runs a fleet of more than 20 trucks and serves clients in Poland and across Europe. He added a banquet hall in his home town in 2010 and an online shop in 2018.
Haulage is a hard way to earn a living: the margins are low and the work is daily, and he has at times driven the trucks himself. The kit’s lesson is about timing: the best time to start is while you still have another income, not after.
Krzysztof Dudziński: a maker inside his own sport
Krzysztof Dudziński was a member of Poland’s national paragliding team and won the national championship in 1993 and 1998. He founded Air-Sport in Zakopane in 1989, before either title. The company designs and makes paragliders and wings for powered paragliding, a small and technical market.
The kit’s lesson: your sport is a market. Somebody makes the equipment, runs the events and provides the services, and they usually know less about the sport than you do.
What the kit could not find
The kit is open about the gaps. For Lewandowska, public sources describe the business in detail but not its obstacles. For Dudziński, the kit found no account of how the company was financed or how it entered the market. That is common: failures and hard starts rarely make the news, as our post on the patterns across all 14 stories explains.
The full stories are in the training kit, with 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).
