Katie Sadlier

At the 2016 Rio Olympics, New Zealand won eighteen medals, the biggest haul in their history and a stark contrast to 2000, when they took just four back across the Tasman. Among those leading the change was a Scottish-born synchronised swimmer called Katie Sadleir, now she’s trying to create even bigger change, in women’s rugby. 

Synchronised swimming is without doubt the most effortless-looking sport that takes the most effort to master. Controlling intricate movements of your body, perfectly in unison with another body (or several bodies), without ever touching the bottom of the pool – strictly against the rules – requires a core made of tungsten but with the flexibility of rubber. Throw in the small matter of only breathing as the routine allows – it’s a case of twenty seconds not breathing, then ten seconds breathing – and also the constant battle against chlorine and other assorted chemicals on your unprotected eyes (goggles are banned, so the judges can see your facial expressions), and it’s perhaps of no surprise that men haven’t been clamouring to join the Olympic party.  Only long-distance runners are said to have more lung capacity.

Made famous by the 1950s films of Esther Williams, in which she performed ‘water ballet’ as part of her role, but dating back much further – the Romans were thought to enjoy ‘water-nymph’ theatrical productions in flooded amphitheatres – it only arrived in the Olympic Games in 1984, in Los Angeles. 

At those Games, competing for New Zealand, was the current global head of women’s rugby [see, we always get to rugby in the end],  Katie Sadleir. “From the age of about thirteen, I was doing about 30 hrs a week training,” she explains, talking to us in Auckland where she’s on World Rugby duty. “You do the training that a competitive swimmer does, and then the flexibility training so you’re able to do the splits in the water.

“You need to be able to ‘over-split’ because you don’t have the weight to bear down,” she adds.

Training with her sister Lynette, who would go on to compete with her in Los Angeles, they lived the elite athlete life, without the financial support. Although born in Aberdeen, Scotland, Katie grew up in Canada. “We lived an hour away from the pool, we’d get up at 5am but I deliberately didn’t learn to drive as I liked to sleep so I let my sister drive,” she laughs. “An hour and a half practice, drive back an hour and then go to school, stinking of chlorine, then after school go back into Vancouver – where the high-performance club was – and then at the weekend have two practices on a Saturday and then a longer practice on the Sunday, it was pretty full on.

“There was a lot of weight training, mental rehearsal, strength and core training, visualisation,” she continues. “It’s a very intense sport. A lot of people make fun of it but it’s an incredibly physically demanding sport. At the ‘84 Olympics, there was a piece of research that said that synchronized swimmers were the most physically fit all round because of the gymnastics flexibility, the stamina and aerobic capacity of many sports and the strength. People in the summer play in the pool, go underwater, put their hands on the bottom and put their legs up. We’re doing the same thing but our hands aren’t on the bottom.”

By the time the Olympics rolled around, Katie’s family had moved to New Zealand, the country she would end up representing, alongside her sister. “We finished twelfth at the Olympics but LA was such an amazing Games to be at,” she recalls, “it was the first Olympics that turned all the athletes into stars – all the Americans went wild, it didn’t matter who you were, you had to sign gum wrappers, tracksuits, everyone was a star. 

“The New Zealand team did really well, we won about twelve medals. When I think about it, that was probably what spurred me on to want to do that as a career, I wanted to be managing sports teams.”

Her own career also saw her secure bronze at the 1986 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh. When she called time on her ‘synchro’ career, she then played competitive water polo – ‘that was my rugby – in the water,’ she says – and then moved into administration first with New Zealand Swimming, then with a New Zealand task force aimed at maximising the fact Sydney was hosting the Olympics across the Tasman. 

With the spotlight so keenly on Australia who were under huge pressure to perform, the question was then asked of New Zealand’s performance programme. And Katie was given the job of finding the answer. “I travelled for about three months looking at programmes everywhere,” she says. “England didn’t really have a programme, I went to Ireland, Italy, but it was Norway where I learnt the most. They were a similar shape and sized country and they were phenomenal at winter Olympic sport – I came away thinking that we should be the Norway of the southern hemisphere in terms of the summer Olympics. 

“The government bought into the idea and we went from four medals in Sydney to eighteen in Rio, it was quite a transformation.”

Six years ago, while a director for Sport New Zealand and High
Performance Sport New Zealand, Katie won a major award, which signalled it was time for a change. “I thought ‘who wins a lifetime achievement award at 50?’” she says. “I was too young to stop, there were gaps too. The whole sport for social change aspect and the power of sport to change people’s lives, I’ve always been interested in that.”

Two weeks later, the first-ever General Manager for Women’s Rugby was advertised. “It was just one of those things,” she says. “Someone said to me ‘have I seen it?’ I was watching what was going on in women’s rugby, saw the Olympics and just thought, ‘what an amazing sport to be associated with’. 

“It had such potential to shake up paradigms and perceptions of what women could and should do, it was growing fast, it was dynamic, passionate and I just thought I’d like to help that, so I threw my name in the hat. 

“The thing that really got me going was, as part of the recruitment process, I had to do a presentation on how would I grow women’s rugby in Asia – linked to the [Japan] Rugby World Cup and the [Tokyo] Olympic Games.

“I met a lot of people in Asia in the lead up to that interview,” she continues. “We all know how important sport is for physical and mental well-being for your own individual sake but when you can really create opportunities to change people’s lives through social cohesion, that’s what’s happening with rugby around the world. 

“There are more girls than boys who play rugby in Laos and rugby is just such a game changer, there are programmes that are stopping girls getting married at a very young age.”

“When I think of the countries where women’s rugby is booming, it’s not that it’s not growing in the traditional countries but in India, Pakistan, Syria and Uganda, Kenya, that is really exciting – listening to the stories of the women involved and the difference that it’s made, it’s really impressive. 

“Last year we launched Try and Stop Us which really challenged perceptions of women and rugby. In Iran, that programme went from 3,000 women involved in rugby to, post-campaign, well over 10,500 and rugby being in every province. 

“We had something like 60 or 80 women put forward from Rugby Africa to feature in the Unstoppable video [the promotional video featuring fifteen different women from different backgrounds across the world] – we had everything from a girl who was bullied at school for her stutter, but fell in love with rugby, to a girl that wanted to play rugby but was forbidden by her uncle and mother because she’d get bruises on her legs and that would mean nobody would want to marry her. She’s in her sevens’ national team now.”

Women’s rugby had previously had a development manager – Sue Carty, now one of the IRFU’s representatives in World Rugby – but Katie’s role took things to a strategic level. “In my first year, I had to develop a global strategy that everyone could buy into,” she says. “To capture that growth and sustain it, we had to do other things with a big-picture vision of accelerating the global development of women in rugby and normalising women’s involvement.”

This is the key bit. They didn’t want women’s rugby to be a ‘tag on’ which promoted a culture of ‘yeah, women can play that too’. While Katie and World Rugby don’t claim to have started every initiative to get women playing rugby, they do aim to link them up and support them. “We had to connect where good things were happening around the world in our sport,” she explains.  

While putting in place strategies to link, develop, and support global initiatives to drive women’s rugby growth, there were also issues closer to home with World Rugby. “When I arrived, we had a chair [Sir Bill Beaumont] with a particular vision about needing to do something to change the diversity make-up of our board, which had 30 men [out of 32 positions].”

At the time, quota systems to fasten the change at board-level were also part of the conversation. “When we were developing the plan, I remember Bill Pulver [former CEO of the Australian Rugby Union] saying they wanted to set a quota, and I said ‘we can’t do that because we’re [World Rugby] so bad – how on earth can we go and say to the RFU or the IFU, or New Zealand Rugby, you must have 30 per cent of your senior boards [as] women when look at us, we’re 30 men.”

To set the example, in 2017 World Rugby increased the number of council members from 32 to 49, with the seventeen extra places taken by women. “That was a fix we needed to do quickly,” says Katie, “we needed to get more women in senior leadership positions and governance. We said we’re a sport that was committed to best international practice but we were not there, so that was a piece of work to be done.”

Change was rolled out across the board from diversity in governance to the content output on social media.  “All organisations linked to the Olympics get a kind of report card from the IOC about gender equality where they assess you against a bunch of criteria,” she says. “Four years ago we were probably at the bottom, now we’re probably one of the top two or three organisations committed to diversity and inclusion across the globe. That’s really exciting, you can’t do anything but be proud of the people pushing that agenda.

“If you look at the board in Wales now and the number of senior women in Japan – they had one woman on their board, now they’ve got five or six, so we’re seeing that change.”

It’s an ongoing piece of work. “I look at the world, and then I have a cohort of fourteen unions and six regional associations that we track on an annual basis looking at the number of women on the board, the number of women in senior leadership positions, coaches, match officials – it doesn’t happen overnight.”

Elevating women to boards wasn’t enough, they also had to ensure they were then in a position to maximise the opportunity. “We offered scholarships to women who were on boards or in senior positions and could be there within two years,” says Katie, referencing World Rugby’s Executive Leadership Scholarship programme, which has awarded 37 scholarships in the past two years. “We provide them with a mentor and worked with them on what it would take to move them up – we’ve now got five of them who are on the World Rugby Council. 

“There was a new president of Burkina Faso,” continues Katie, “she came along to a regional workshop – didn’t speak a word of English – but she had a vision to get involved in global rugby. She told me – through a translator – that she had to learn English, so a huge chunk of her funding was put into her mastering English, and she is now on the board of Rugby Africa and the World Rugby Council and the sub-committee of World Rugby. She came up to me in Japan [during the Rugby World Cup] and spoke to me in English and it was such a great thing. She’s still the president of Burkina Faso and she’s one of the leaders in African rugby.”

In the modern day, you’d think the work of Katie should be supported by all and sundry but that’s not the case. “As with all organisations, World Rugby is no different from other sports,” she explains. “You’ll have people who are absolutely passionate about what you want to do and do everything to get on board, and there is the chunk of people who don’t think women should play rugby. 

“And there are a lot of them, they still exist,” she adds, “and there are a whole bunch of people for whom it depends who’s in the room as to what they feel about women’s rugby.

“You have to be aware [of the different attitudes] but what I have seen a lot of, is people moving in terms of their attitude. 

“I ran a workshop at one of the general assemblies and one guy in particular came up to me and said, ‘you know Katie, a lot of people have blind spots, they just don’t realise that the way they’re acting is creating a barrier – I’m so ashamed, I have daughters, I can’t believe what a barrier I have been. I could have done so much more to create the change – I’m going home and I’m going to do that’. 

“That was an amazing moment,” admits Katie, “and there are some people who look at this [change] and think is it really necessary. 

“And, of course it is,” she continues, “we know how important diversity is, we know how important it is to have boards that reflect your stakeholders, and we now have a chairman and chief executive [Brett Gosper] who unashamedly talks about women’s rugby being the strategic growth of the game. The women’s advisory committee is chaired by Serge Simon and he is a passionate feminist, he has daughters who play the game and is absolutely committed to ensure that women’s rugby gets the time and resources that it deserves.”

Having such support is key to Katie’s role. “It’s such a fast-transforming sport that it’s so easy for me and World Rugby to work with the people who want to be in this space and want to be better,” she says. “We have to let them be the ones to bring others forward – I don’t have the capacity to change everyone at once – so you let others show the way and that sets you rolling .”

Even without the considerations of Covid, this coming Rugby World Cup year – the first with gender-neutral branding – is key for the sport. “It’s the golden year for women’s rugby,” says Katie, “a World Cup and the Olympics in the same year, it’s quite unique.”

Covid will have an impact. In England, the closure of the sevens programme, dramatically slashed the percentage of female professionals in the country, which could damage development. “We have made a commitment to not reduce [funding, due to Covid] but in fact increase the amount of money put into women’s rugby,” says Katie, “we’ve made that call, we don’t control the money that England, New Zealand or Australia puts into it, but we’re saying that, from our perspective, this is really important. 

“With Covid relief, one of the factors we put in there was our expectation that there was an appropriate proportion of money put towards women. I’m not sure we’ve monitored that yet, time will tell.”

The bundling up of men’s and women’s sponsorship deals is also coming to an end. “Up until last year we had no separate commercial strategy for women’s rugby,” she explains. “All our funding was coupled, so if you became a sponsor of the men’s World Cup, you also had the women’s thrown in, bundled up, but we’re now selling woman’s rugby separately. We’re looking for partners until 2025 to sponsor and support women’s rugby and that want to activate that support. 

“We’re saying, ‘woman’s rugby is rugby, but we want commercial partners associated that are truly committed’ – we’re no longer just giving away the rights.”

The growth is everywhere, and women now account for 28 per cent [2.7m from 9.6m players] of the playing population. At the elite level, while there’s certainly been progress in nations competing against the duopoly of England and New Zealand [who have shared all but one of the Rugby World Cup titles, with USA in the inaugural 1991 tournament the only anomaly], the gap remains a chasm beneath. “The goal was to reduce the gap between the top half and the bottom half of the field,” says Katie. “In the last four years we have done a high-performance review of the regions in both sevens and fifteens to understand what were the critical things that are going well.

“We then identified who we thought was in the bottom six and put in place independent performance consultants and invested in them. We increased the number of competitions, there was a 51 per cent increase in Tests that took place between 2018 and 2019, which was a huge increase.

“We invested heavily in regional competitions, all African competition, South America, Asia – we created cross-regional and global competitions in fifteens to provide the opportunity for people to compete on a more regular basis. If you weren’t in the Six Nations, then there wasn’t a lot going on in between Rugby World Cups.

“Two-thirds of fans that say they’re interested in women’s rugby have only been interested in the last two to three years. That’s quite a quick change, maybe that’s because there’s more to see?”

Despite the growth, the women’s rugby world remains patchy in places. “We’re dealing with 120 member unions, but some don’t even have coaches,” explains Katie, “so there’s much work to do to bring up the bottom half, and to help fast-track proper high-performance programmes. 

“When you think about what’s happened in some of those countries in a really short period of time and how long it’s taken for their equivalent men’s programmes, this change is happening faster.”

The impatience is there though, as the world’s favourite leader pointed out. “Jacinda Ardern [New Zealand’s prime minister] handed out the jerseys to the Black Ferns, and she’s very passionate about women’s rugby,” says Katie, “she said, ‘we all talk about these great changes that are happening around the world but sometimes it’s like a glacier that’s melting slowly – you just want to get the hair dryer on it’. 

“We all want to be there at pace, but it is happening.”  

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Jamie Bowering

This extract was taken from issue 12 of Rugby.
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