Olympic Gold Medalist, and World Leader in Sports Medicine
Dr Richard Budgett was the Medical and Scientific Director of the IOC from October 2012 to December 2024. Before that he was Chief Medical Officer for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games from 2007 to 2012.
Richard was Director of Medical Services for the British Olympic Association from 1994 to 2007 and Team GB Chief Medical Officer at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Nagano, Sydney, Salt Lake City, Athens and Turin. He was team doctor to the Great Britain men’s rowing team from 2005 to 2008 and was Governing Body Medical Officer for the Great Britain Bobsleigh Association from 1990 to 2007 attending the Olympic Winter Games in Albertville in 1992 and Lillehammer in 1994. He was a member of the IOC Medical Commission at the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008 and Winter Games in Vancouver in 2010.
Today I’m in Switzerland and I’m talking to Richard Budget, former Chief Medical Officer of the IOC (International Olympic Committee). Let me take you back to the very, very beginning because you were born in Glasgow…
Richard Budgett: Obviously I can’t remember it very well as I was there until I was 18 months old. And, like many people in Britain, I love to think of myself as Scottish or Irish or Welsh rather than an English, because it has more of a romantic ring to it. My heart is still in Scotland but I left there before I was two years old. Hence the lack of a Scottish accent.
DMacA: But there’s a hint in the name. It isn’t just Richard Budgett, it’s Richard Gordon Mc Bride Budgett, so there must be a longer connection.
RB: Yes. If I look at my heritage, it’s more than half Scottish, probably more than three quarters Scottish with the Gordon clan, and the McBride’s and the MacIeroy’s. And we’ve got a lot of roots in Scotland. When I was young we used to visit Scotland quite frequently because we have a lot of relatives there.
DMacA: You moved south and you later went to school at Radley. Was that the start of your sporting career?
RB: Yes. I was one of those kids who was really very poor at sport. I was far too slow, always quite large, and not very good at catching or throwing the ball. So, when I was introduced to rowing, I was like a duck taking to water, and it went on from there.
DMacA: Now that we have the sporting connection, we need to talk about medicine. When did you get interested in medicine?
RB: It grew, I suppose, through my teenage years. I was always more interested in the sciences and biology and even enjoyed physics and maths. But, it was really the interest in people and the science behind it that attracted me to medicine. And so I made the decision to go into medicine. But I think that as teenagers, 16 or 17 years old, you don’t know what you’re signing up for. It is just a myth that you have in your head about what it’s like to be a doctor. But you mould yourself, and you get moulded into something that can actually work.
DMacA: When you go to a school like Radley, which is a dedicated rowing school, how do you balance the academic and the sport? Was that a challenger?
RB: I don’t remember it being a challenge because it’s a boarding school, you’re there a long time, your days are long. So fitting in the training, which wasn’t as hard then as it is now, was built into the curriculum. Everyone was expected to do sport and in my case, it was rowing. You had lots of time for studying and there never seemed to be a shortage of time for doing homework, or studying ,or any academic pursuits. And then when it came to the racing, the regattas were, of course, at the weekends so that wasn’t an issue either.
Hon Fellow, Selwyn College 2023
DMacA: So, lets move on to university…
RB: I went to Selwyn College, Cambridge, and I remember turning up and writing at the bottom of my details that I rowed and they got very excited when they saw I was two metres tall. I really enjoyed my time at Cambridge, rowing for Selwyn College. I actually trialled for the ‘Blue’ boat in my final year, in 1980, and got to the last 20, but got thrown out because I had a very awkward rowing style. It wasn’t until I then went on to the University of London for my clinical years that I actually, became faster and went international.
DMacA: When you say you’ve an awkward rowing style, I smile, because in 1981 you find yourself in the ultimate boat for the athlete with the big engine, the coxed pair. That was what really put you into the limelight.
RB: It was out of nowhere, and I remember one of the newspaper headlines was “Cambridge reject gets bronze medal.” (World Championships). We surprised ourselves and everybody else, in a pair that had rowed together for five weeks. It was with another doctor, Thomas Cadoux Hudson, we were both at University of London (UL), We won the selection, and then four weeks later, we were racing against the East Germans and the Italians at the World Championships. In fact, it was the very first race that the Abbagnale brothers (Italian) won and they won every coxed pair race after than until they were finally beaten by the Searle brothers at the Barcelona Olympics (1992). So it was a bit of history.
DMacA: How did that all fit in with your medical studies?
RB: It was more challenging, I have to admit, when I was at UL. They were very understanding but you have to turn up to all your clinical attachments and fitting that around all the rowing commitments was very hard. I really didn’t expect to pass all my finals and thought I was going to have to retake some of them. But, after passing, I negotiated a year off from 83 to 84 when they said I could delay the start of my ‘House Jobs’ for a year so I could train full time. And that made all the difference. So, I was suddenly able to train three times a day, which at the time we thought was ridiculously hard. None of us had ever done anything like that before but it just raised the standard. We went from being in the final but not being near medals, to being medallist material.
DMacA: You brought up a very interesting point there. Nowadays academia seems to give a little bit for sport, but in those days you were expected to do what everybody else did in medicine.
RB: Yes, we all did that. In fact, most athletes, if you look at their academic achievements, do disproportionately well because you have the discipline of having to fit around your sporting endeavours. But, undoubtedly, academia came first. I was very lucky that the Middlesex Hospital where I was training were happy for me to take a whole year off. And that really made the difference. They did say that if I didn’t come back after a year, I would have to retake my finals. (The year in hospital after finishing final medical examinations is considered an integral part of medical training). That was quite sobering. But, basically it made a fantastic difference.
Richard as part of the Olympic Gold Medal winning Coxed Four 1984
Watch the video of the 1984 Olympic Final- Gold Medal winning Coxed Four by following this link on You Tube.
DMacA: At the end of that year, your crew appeared quietly out of the mist on Lake Casitas, (winning the final and Olympic Gold at Los Angeles) Such an interesting crew, some fascinating people…
RB: It included Steve Redgrave. None of us knew at the time that Steve was going to go on and win four more Olympic Gold Medals, let alone appear on “Dancing on Ice” this year! There was an article about us in the Daily Telegraph (National UK newspaper) by Desmond Hill, that labelled us as “The Unlikely Lads.” We even got some T-shirts printed with “The Unlikely Lads” on them and raced in those at Henley. It rather appealed to us that because we were a real mixed bag including Martin Cross, who was a teacher at Hampton School, and who now does a lot of work in broadcasting. And then there was Andy Holmes, who was always a challenging character and quite difficult, but very sadly, died of Weil’s disease. And then our cox, Adrian Ellison, who is a radiographer. So it was quite mixed with all the characters in the boat, but we just gelled. There was obviously good individual talent, and that’s the great thing about rowing, that whatever the crew does it has to be more than a sum of the parts.
Awarded the Prince Phillip Medal in 2015 for outstanding contribution to Sports Medicine.
See a full report by Dr Kate Hornby in BJSM
DMacA: But you were still trying to be a doctor and you trained in general practice. Indeed, I came across a book where you’re named as one of the 100 notable GP’s…So tell us about your training in general practice.
RB: Sport and Exercise medicine didn’t really exist properly back then. It wasn’t a specialty that you could go into. So, I was attracted to general practice from the beginning, and started my GP training at Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow. It just so happened, by an extraordinary quirk of fate, that the British Olympic Association had decided to set up their medical centre at Northwick Park so I wandered down there after a few days. I didn’t quite have my Olympic gold medal hanging around my neck, but they said- yes, come and be involved, do some research. So I had to think, what research shall I do? I read around a bit and came across some work done on testosterone and cortisol ratios and fatigue in athletes. So, I thought, I’ll do something like that and I could use rowers, all the people I’d been racing with, as guinea pigs. So that was the start of my interest in what used to be called overtraining syndrome and fatigue in athletes and unexplained underperformance has been my main research interest since then.
DMacA: You were pretty much ahead of your time and that was pioneering research which has continued to be important, not just in sport but across the across the whole spectrum of chronic fatigue. You also talked about the very beginning of sports medicine. I think you were in the very first cohort of sports medicine Diplomates?
RB: As soon as I finished my GP training in 1988, I went to the London Hospital and did the Diploma in Sports Medicine. It had been going for about three years then. It was founded by John King, a larger than life consultant orthopaedic surgeon at the Royal London Hospital, and to whom we owe so much. That really exposed me to the British Association of Sport and Exercise Medicine, and the whole community of sport medicine doctors. I realized that while I didn’t want to go full time in general practice, I couldn’t afford to go straight into sport medicine. There just wasn’t a career at that time so, I looked around for a half time GP post, which I found in Acton where I was living, and I stayed in London to build a career in sports medicine.
DMacA: Take us through that career in sports medicine.
RB: Like anyone else in the specialty of sports medicine, or I should say the non specialty of sports medicine as it was then, you had to a lot of volunteering.
DMacA: Many people listening may not realize when they look at sports medicine now, where there is a very definite career path that at that time there neither a career nor a career path. It was about putting it together yourself.
RB: Yes, it was just enthusiasts wanting to look after athletes. And there were some role models around that I could follow. Dr Peter Thomas, who’d been looking after the rowers, was a great help to me and Dr Malcolm Read, who many will remember. Those people who had been practicing sports medicine were really enthusiasts at that time. I was lucky enough to be offered the role of looking after the bobsleigh team when I was recruited famously by Dr Michael Turner. He was looking after both the alpine skiers and the bobsleigh team, and he needed somebody to help him with the bobsleigh team. He said, “Richard, you’re big enough, you do it.” So I took on the bobsleigh team in 1989-90, was involved with the bobsleigh team for the next 15-16 years. It is an extraordinary sport with a lot of similarities, funnily enough, to rowing where you spend a lot of time tinkering with things, adjusting everything, getting ready. It’s a crew sport, you’re trained together but, of course, it’s all over in a in a few seconds rather than the six minutes or so on the rowing course.
DMacA: Then you moved to the main medical officer role.
RB: I was working in general practice, and then my role at the British Olympic Medical Centre was converted from voluntary research into an actual clinical post. I was very fortunate that I was then employed through the hospital to work with the British Olympic Association. At that time it was really wonderful to have the medical centre at Northwick Park Hospital with all the connections to the consultants and facilities. But it soon became apparent that we really needed more medical services closer to where the athletes were training. So that’s how the English Institute of Sport was created and I became part of that based at Bisham Abbey. It was about at that time that I had enough of a portfolio to be able to stop general practice. I’d already gone down from half time to one third time, and you really can’t do less than one third time. My partners were very understanding and flexible which allowed me to do that. And I enjoyed general practice. I particularly enjoyed working with the staff and the partners, and many of the patients, but I wasn’t sorry to leave because my passion was in sports medicine.
DMacA: The Institutes of Sport were the beginning of a new dawn in sports medicine in the UK…
RB: It was quite visionary. Everything came at once. The lottery funding meant athletes could go professional.The coaches knew that there was some security and they too could be much more professional, and all the support staff were available through these institutes. It was modelled on the Australian Institute of Sport, and they built on that. With any major change like that, as you can imagine, there are stresses and tensions. You had the individual sports still looking after themselves, wanting to be independent. They had their own medical team, their own coaches, their own set up. But, having someone come in with an all singing- all dancing, multidisciplinary team, working in an interdisciplinary way, was very exciting for us but was quite new for many of the sports. They had to adjust to that and they did. At Bisham Abbey we had the hockey team, the rowers, the canoe team and various others.
DMacA: It must have been a challenging political environment because sport is always so focused and so determined to the exclusion of everything else. Bringing together these groups of people must have been quite difficult.
RB: I think it probably was. I wasn’t responsible for recruiting and bringing the sports into the fold, that was done at the political level, but I was responsible for making sure that we delivered the sort of medical care that would keep them there, and happy. And I was very pleased to do that. At that time, I was working for the British Olympic Association as the Chief Medical Officer. I was the bobsleigh team doctor at the Olympics in Albertville in 1992, and then in 1994 at Lillehammer. From 1996 onwards, which was the Atlanta Olympics Games, I was Chief Medical Officer with the Great Britain team. That took 2 or 3 days of my time and for the other 2 or 3 days, although it would vary a bit, I would be with the Institute
“It was just the sheer euphoria and joy of everyone in that crowd and the realisation that it was actually going to change our lives. And it did.”
DMacA: Lets move on now to the Olympics in 2012, that must have been enormously exciting, but a challenge at the same time.
RB: It was so exciting. But I would go back to 2005 when we won the bid. I remember being in Trafalgar Square and none of us thought we were going to beat Paris. London and Paris were competing in the final vote and then suddenly the result came through that London was selected for the 2012 Olympics. It was just the sheer euphoria and joy of everyone in that crowd and the realisation that it was actually going to change our lives. And it did. I applied for the role of Chief Medical Officer for London 2012, started that part time in 2007, carrying on with my work at the English Institute of Sport work and eventually became full time. It was very different type of work, as you can imagine. You’re not caring for a team, you’re not worried about your team’s performance, you’re actually worried about the health of everybody coming to the Games with the athletes as a priority.
DMacA: Was it fun?
RB: It was fun, but not always fun. Sometimes there was stress. As with any good job sometimes it’s a stress and a hassle. And you think, why? Why does this have to happen? But most of the time, it was – pinch yourself, what a privilege it is to be part of this. It’s just incredible. Everyone, of course, was saying it’s going to be a disaster. But, to be honest, they’ve also said this before every Olympics I’ve been involved with since then with IOC. People saying it’s going to be a disaster and it’s going to be terrible, we should cancel the Games or postpone them or whatever. And nine times out of ten they come good and everyone says what a triumph that was. London was no exception. There were all sorts of people saying that this is not going to work, it’s going to be chaos, it’s going to be terrible. And then the torch arrived and the atmosphere changed. By the time of the opening ceremony, and certainly by the time we got our first medals for Team GB, the atmosphere was electric, everyone was in their uniforms and, on public transport, everyone was talking to each other. The whole atmosphere in London was different
DMacA: Could you relax?
RB: Not until the end. I relaxed in the last few days, but I was just hoping that there wouldn’t be any curved balls coming out of nowhere that we hadn’t predicted. In fact, it’s been the same with every Games. It is quite tense leading up to it. And then slowly as things begin to sort themselves out, as the gears are oiled and running smoothly, you can relax. I was quite relaxed, I suppose, for the Paralympic Games, because I knew we’d done the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games is that much smaller. And, there’s a different atmosphere. People are much more open, relaxed and cheerful whereas, while the stakes are incredibly high for both Games, they are extraordinarily high for the Olympics. You really are in a goldfish bowl with the world looking at you.
DMacA: So by 2012, you had done how many Olympics?
RB: In total I’ve done nine summer and nine winter Olympic Games, but by 2012 six summer and six winter Olympic Games.
DMacA: You move on to become Chief Medical Officer for the IOC, graduating from being that awkward medical student who couldn’t make the Blue boat to the number one position in medicine in the Olympic movement. Tell us about that.
RB: Well, it was a surprise. And I suppose, like many of the things one applies to in life, it does help if you really don’t expect to get it, because then you’re relaxed when it comes to the interviews. I had three interviews through April 2012 before the Games. I remember flying over to Lausanne before one of them when the plane was cancelled and I had to get on a different plane and arrived about midnight for an interview at 9:00 the next morning. It was potentially quite stressful but I was totally relaxed because I thought this is just an adventure and it will be fine. And I got the role. Looking back, I should have realized it does help to have an Olympic Gold Medal and with a CV where I’d done the Games both as a team doctor and an organizing committee. So, I had the basics to get it, but it was still an amazing feeling to suddenly be offered this role.
Then there was quite a big decision, as it has been for my successor Jane Thornton, to move to Switzerland, disrupt my family and one of my children’s education. It’s a big life step to move to another country but I’ve never regretted it.
DMacA: People might think that being Chief Medical Officer for the Olympics, is all fun and enjoyment and one long party but there must have been a lot of worries during those 12 years. What were the major concerns that kept you awake at night?
RB: I often talk to people about the challenges and drama of each Games, and that with all of them there was something different, things that we didn’t know about it at the time Looking back. I was quite naive. The very first Games I did as Medical Director for the IOC was Sochi in 2014. I remember arriving there, looking around the anti-doping laboratory and thinking, this is wonderful. They had built this lovely new anti-doping laboratory, and even better, the headquarters of the police was next door, so it was going to be wonderfully secure. I had no concept that there was going to be a hole in the wall, with samples taken into the police station to be tampered with, emptied and the new samples put in. Unbelievable, you couldn’t make it up. Looking back that was the big stress of Sochi, which was otherwise a well organized and successful Games. Then there was Rio in 2016, and the challenges of South American organization. We were constantly reassured that it’ll be fine. And in the end, it was fine, but it was pretty close. And we benefited greatly from Dr João Grangeiro Neto who was the chief medical officer there, an ex Olympian, who really knew what was needed and managed make it happen because he had great authority in medical circles in Brazil. And if you remember, we had calls from all over the world saying we should cancel the Games, that it was irresponsible to hold them because of Zika. The outbreak of Zika was obviously very frightening for athletes and for support staff going there, if they might be pregnant, or if they had family who might be pregnant, and the abnormalities that could result from Zika. So there were a lot of calls. That was the first time I’d worked really closely with the World Health Organization (WHO), who were hugely helpful. With all these calls for the Games to be deferred, it was undoubtedly quite stressful. In the end, there was not a single case of Zika in the Olympic Village so we were alright. Again, it’s another one that came good in the end. At the other Games there was very often some public health issue, whether it was Norovirus in Pyeongchang or the Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing during the Ebola outbreak in Africa where several teams couldn’t come because of Ebola. And then of course, we had Covid. The Games were postponed for a year but the fact that they actually happened in Tokyo is a huge tribute to the Japanese who managed to put them on. It was really tough. They were geared up to holding the Games in 2020 and then everything was put on ice for a year. They had the MRI machine in place and they had to keep it turning over for a whole year. The expense of everything, it was unbelievable. And it was so sad because, when we arrived in Tokyo there were beautiful facilities all set up ready for the spectators and hoping, right until the last moment, that spectators would be able to come. Then the decision was made- no spectators- so you had all these empty stands. The sport itself was great, the Games were wonderful for the Olympians and I think it still looked good on television. In many ways, the Olympics was a success and it was saved but at extraordinary expense, effort, and stress. Everyone was being tested, worried about turning positive, worried about having to go into quarantine and isolation. We’ve all been through it during that time.
DMacA: Richard, I’m so glad we were able to finish up by looking at some of the difficulties you faced in the job, because people can then appreciate what a wonderful job you’ve actually done. Thank you very much for taking us through your career, and thank you very much for everything you’ve done for sport and medicine, and the Olympic movement. Thank you.
