Emma Uren
2020 was meant to be the year that Emma Uren finally had a story to rival that of her mother Lotta’s tales of working with Madonna and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers.
Instead, she underwent major hamstring surgery, was made redundant, and ended up modelling her mum’s Swedish clogs more often than she pulled on a pair of rugby boots. So, 2021?
COVID-19 is the second virus to stand in the way of Emma Uren going to an Olympic Games. The first was Epstein-Barr which brought her burgeoning swimming career to an end, the virus having prompted a bout of glandular fever when she was fifteen, knocking her out of the sport for four months and leaving her constantly fatigued. Swimming never held the same appeal again.
And so she took up rugby and, within five years, had found a possible route to the Olympic Games through sevens, having helped England secure a Tokyo 2020 qualifying berth for Team GB last summer.
Then virus No.2 struck.
Emma didn’t contract COVID-19 but she was one of the many people across the world to lose her job because of it. Aged 23, and one year into a three-year deal to play sevens full-time, she was made redundant.
As she recounts these ups and downs to the Rugby Journal during lockdown she is sitting in her parents’ home office in Twickenham – where she can see the stadium from her bedroom – and is keen to explain first-up why reams of multi-coloured fabric surround her computer.
“We sell clogs,” she says. “Our family business is called ‘Lotta from Stockholm’ – my mum’s called Lotta, she’s Swedish – and we sell Swedish clogs.
“There’s some pairs here and some up there,” she adds, giving her laptop camera a 360-degree spin of the room. “We’ve got loads of them. We have six people working for us, a warehouse and when it’s busy we sell 300-400 pairs a day, and then obviously when it’s not busy, it’s a lot less.
“I work for them whenever they need extras. They will ask ‘can you jump in and do a few hours here’ and I do. Normally I work for them doing modelling and stuff like that rather than being in the warehouse. This is a tough time and I don’t want to be taking any hours off an employee. I have a lot of passion for the business but I kind of want to get into something else.”
Work is occupying most of Emma’s thoughts when we speak in October 2020. Well, work and rugby. Which for Emma are very much in the same social bubble. Since her redundancy was confirmed in August, she has been job hunting and is now three weeks into a part-time coaching role at London Scottish, coaching her younger brother Joey’s team.
“I was watching him train one day last season and they asked me ‘sorry to be cheeky here, can you jump in and coach for a moment?’,” she says. “I didn’t mind and last season I did it for free but this season I’ve had to say ‘I’m really sorry, but I’ve just been made redundant, so I can’t do it for free, I need to have something that gives me a bit of income’. They said there was an opportunity for a paid coach coming up. I was like, ‘yes please’ so I do that twice a week now.”
As yet, there’s been no sibling bust-ups. Even if Emma does target Joey when doing demonstrations, “with COVID and everything, it’s easier to pick on him,” she says.
She’s enjoying it too. “Being a female coach in a lads environment is funny. You go in and it’s like ‘who are you?’.
“‘Well, I play England sevens’.
“And then when you start coaching them they are like ‘OK, you can play rugby’. You can have a bit of banter [with this age group] but they know the line.”
Alongside her coaching, Emma – who plays at scrum-half, centre and wing in sevens and across the back three in fifteens – has been diligently rehabbing her hamstring following surgery in January 2020. When we talk, she’s about to make a return to match action, for Saracens in the Allianz Premier 15s. “I’m literally so excited,” she says. “A bit nervous because I’ve only done two full sessions of contact since I completely tore my hamstring in a ruck in December [2019]. I had an operation in January where they unfused the tendon, which had slid down my leg, pulled it back up and sowed it together. It’s feeling really good, I’m lucky to have such good people around me helping me through the injury. I’ll get ten minutes on the pitch I think. If it were up to me, I’d like a bit more.”
In the event, Emma does get a bit more, crossing for two tries in a 20-minute spell off the bench against Darlington Mowden Park. It sparks the start of her return to fitness which – 5 months later in February 2021 – will see her get selected for the initial GB7s training squad. Should Emma go on to make the final squad and help Team GB win a medal in Tokyo, her story will surely be family folklore for generations.
There is stiff competition, however, from her mother Lotta, whose stories of her days working for Warner Music in Stockholm could leave jaws on the floor.
“If any artist came into Sweden, mum would look after them,” Emma explains, “taking them to their venues, sorting their day out, handling the media, making sure they had a good time so they would come back.
“The first ever gig I went to see was the Red Hot Chilli Peppers when I was really young because mum and dad were working with them. Mum brings them up the whole time, she went out clubbing with them, and says that going out for dinner with them was crazy because they could only order food by their blood group so it would take two hours to order! They’d want the chicken but would have to look through this book and be like ‘what’s the chicken’s blood group’? Yeah, mad. And other stories where she would have to save them from going to jail!
“She also mentioned in passing that I used to play with Madonna’s child. When Madonna came to Sweden she would bring her kid and we would play together as we were the same age. It’s absolutely weird!”
Although Emma’s dad Jon also worked with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers in his role at Warner Music, “he doesn’t have as many good stories”. Hailing from Plymouth, Jon met Lotta through the company and they settled in Twickenham, with Lotta initially flying back and forth to Sweden for work, casually bringing her daughter along for play-dates with the best-selling female artist of all time.
Jon may not have as many stories but he had a significant hand in guiding Emma from a talented swimmer to a professional rugby player.
“After I’d told him I’d lost the love for swimming we sat in the car together and Dad was like ‘d’you know Em, I understand, but you’ve got to do something’. So, we ticked off the other sports I’d done. I’d done bit of netball for Middlesex but didn’t enjoy that; handball, nope, didn’t enjoy that either. It came down to athletics and rugby and Dad said you can’t just do one sport, you’ve got to do two. I was like ‘that’s fair’. I had done a bit of rugby league in school and I’d always got a great buzz off it so we went to my local rugby club Grasshoppers and I fell in love with it. After a while athletics moved to the side and rugby became my sport.
“Really soon after I’d started playing, I was put forward for Middlesex and then got offered a London South East trial. Me and my dad were like, ‘is this a joke? They must have sent this out wrong’. I’d only been training for about eight weeks. I went along and just ran around like a lost puppy, I didn’t know any of the rules, I just knew how to tackle and run.”
Despite a lack of experience, Emma showed more than enough to make it into London South East and after two additional years learning the game, she was put forward for England U20s. Then one day, she was summoned to Twickenham.
“They called me in and I was thinking they were going to talk about development or something but they offered me a contract there and then for the sevens programme. It all came out of the blue.”
Every day as a professional rugby player has been treasured by Emma and she describes professionalism as ‘living the dream’. That’s not lip service either, she really was living her best life as a professional athlete.
“To be able to go in to work and push yourself to the limit, then to come home, recover, and for that to be your day. And to be able to do that the next day as well, it was phenomenal, and it’s so rare to get that. You know, even when I was injured I loved it. Because you have the whole staff around you, to look after you and push you to be the best you can be. Now, with fifteens, yes there’s a network but it’s not the same. You have to train in the evenings and you’re back at 10.00 rather than 5.00. And then you have to work the next day, I look back and think ‘shit that was living the dream’. I loved it.”
There is a special place in Emma’s sporting dreams for the Olympic Games. Like so many youngsters interested in sport, she fell in love with the Olympics through watching them on television every four years. But there’s also a Hobbit-like obsession with the Olympic rings themselves.
“I always wanted to go to the Olympics. My swim coach Ed Sinclair had been an Olympian and always walked round with an Olympic ring on his finger. It was in the shape of the Olympic rings and was gold. It always made me think ‘wow, that’s cool.’
“When I stopped swimming, I did think ‘shit, what am I going to do?’ so the fact that England had qualified GB [for Tokyo] and that I was in the training squad ... it felt so close.”
The sevens events at Tokyo are slated to begin on Monday the 26 July 2021 which – with Tokyo entering a renewed state of emergency lockdown in April – still feels like a far-off land.
But Emma is of the opinion that there is still some degree of control in the hands of the sevens players who had their world flipped upside down when their contracts ended.
“I never believed that sevens was over,” she says. “I always believed there was something for us to come back to and now I believe that if we push hard enough we will get there.”
And if she does, her story might possibly top those of her mum.
Story by Jack Zorab
Pictures by Oli Hillyer-Riley