Our training kit tells 14 stories of athletes who built something beyond sport, from a paraglider maker in Zakopane to a tennis academy in Bree. Read side by side, the stories start to repeat.
The kit is careful about what that means. Fourteen cases are not a statistical sample, and none of this is a finding about athlete-founders in general. But six patterns come up often enough to be worth your attention. Every fact below comes from the public sources listed in the kit.
1. Many of them started before they retired
Mariusz Pudzianowski founded his transport company in 1997, more than a decade before his strongman career ended. Krzysztof Dudziński founded Air-Sport, a paraglider manufacturer, in 1989, four years before his first national title. Anna Lewandowska finished two university diplomas while she was still competing in karate. Kim Clijsters opened her tennis academy in 2014, between her second and third retirements.
The kit’s conclusion is direct: if you are still competing and plan to start afterwards, you are choosing the harder version.
2. There was a step in between
Almost nobody in the collection went straight from competition to a working business. After retiring in 2012, Élodie Ouedraogo worked in the editorial department of Elle Belgium, and her relay teammate Olivia Borlée studied design. They launched their fashion brand in 2016. Sinan Güler ran an online sports shoe shop before he began investing. Ozan Yelaldı’s rowing career ended at 18. He studied coaching, coached at two clubs and with national teams, and founded his own club in Bursa more than 20 years after his last race.
The job, the degree or the small first venture in between is where they learned the industry they went on to build in.
3. The idea often came from a frustration
Ouedraogo and Borlée started a clothing brand because they disliked the kit they had been made to wear: Borlée has described how manufacturers imposed one look on every athlete. Jessica Ennis-Hill built a women’s health company around a gap she saw, looking back, in her own Olympic training: how little it knew about the physiological differences between men and women. Güray Zünbül, a sailor, studied psychology because he saw that Turkish sport was missing it.
None of these ideas came from scanning a market for opportunities. Each grew out of something the founder had lived through in their own sport. One of the kit’s reflection questions is worth asking yourself: what has been missing from your sport for as long as you can remember?
4. The small end teaches more
The range is wide. Yelaldı’s rowing club has 130 members. The club that Oğuzhan Polat, a Paralympic archer, founded for athletes with disabilities has won 85 cups since 2019. At the other end, Ennis-Hill’s company raised £1 million from investors and was later bought by another company.
The kit suggests reading the small end first, especially if your self-efficacy score in the assessment tool came out red or amber. The distance between where you are and a rowing club with 130 members is one you can actually picture.
5. They built what was missing
Where support was missing, several of them built it. Polat founded his club for athletes with disabilities. Güler founded an accelerator programme for sport startups. Birgit Skarstein, a Paralympic champion, co-founded a foundation for disability inclusion in sport and working life.
It is a direct answer to a barrier athletes described in our research: support exists, but it is not built for athletes.
6. Failure is missing from the record
Only one of the 14 stories documents something that did not work, and only because the founder wrote about it herself. Ennis-Hill launched her company in 2019 with fitness advice for pregnancy, the months after birth and everyday training. In her own account, the market was already crowded, much of it with free content, and the company had to change direction. It moved to hormonal health, built an app around it and went on to raise investment.
The kit asks you to assume that every other founder in it also had periods when things were not working, and that nobody reported them. Its advice is worth repeating in full: “If your first venture struggles, you are not the exception in this collection. You are the norm that the collection cannot show you.”
Which one sounds like you?
Start with the stories that look like your own situation: your country, your sport, your stage of career. If you have taken the assessment tool, the kit’s story index lets you begin with the parts of the mindset that came out red or amber.
The training kit is free to download. Our introduction to the kit explains how its stories, courses and resources fit together.
ENTREMIND is an Erasmus+ Sport partnership co-funded by the European Union (project 101229842).
