An esteemed former international rugby star, multiple world record holder, intrepid adventurer and now multinational business director: at 39, Ollie Phillips boasts a CV like no other.
Phillips shone in a high-flying playing career that included spells at Newcastle Falcons and Stade Francais. But his unique swashbuckling talent made him untouchable in the Sevens format. In a truly exceptional career in the short version of the game, Phillips established himself as one of the greats. He captained England to three World Series Cup victories and was voted 2009 World Sevens Rugby Player of the Year.
From starting his rugby journey aged four, Phillips was able to live out his childhood dreams and the glory and adulation that came with such success was intoxicating. That, however, was what also made a premature end to his journey in 2014 so crushing.
Injury problems forced early retirement and Phillips felt robbed of several years playing and the opportunity to captain Team GB’s Sevens side at the Rio 2016 Olympics. An innocuous issue turned out to be his undoing as he learned a pain in his calf was actually an inoperable severed nerve.
“Every injury I had, my reaction was ‘tell me what rehab to do, what weight to lift and I’ll do it 50 times better and I’ll come back three months earlier than you think, but for this, there was nothing,” Phillips told Mirror Sport. “I thought I’d come back and have 18 months to get myself fit and then make the Rio Olympics the last port of call in my rugby career but they were delusions of grandeur.”
Rugby almost became an addiction of its own for Phillips as he desperately tried to cling onto the competitive environment that consumed his entire identity. He soon embarked on the first of a series of monumental challenges to fill his professional sporting void. Despite having never sailed before, Phillips led Great Britain to second in the famous Clipper Round the World yacht race whilst on an injury sabbatical.
“I was adamant that I was going to be okay but I was in total denial,” he admitted. “I had a year in the Clipper Race where I believed my own hype and comeback story. Then I came back, tried for six months, but my calf didn’t work again and I thought that was going to be it.”
But it wasn’t until after breaking a Guinness World Record that Phillips truly accepted his fate. Phillips agreed to tackle the punishing extremities of the Arctic and feature in an attempt at the world’s most northern rugby match at the North Pole. Upon his return from succeeding in the mammoth mission, he accepted a complete career change with a ‘9-to-5’ corporate job as a director at global accounting giants PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC). That was when reality really struck.
“I was asked if I would go to the North Pole and set the world record which was a distraction,” Phillips said. “It was only when I came back from that when I knew. I met a partner from PwC while sailing around the world who said he’d never seen a leader like me and said ‘come work for us’. I came back, started the new job full of energy but then after about two months it suddenly hit me like a bus that ‘oh sh**, actually, this is all over.”
“Everything that I’ve identified myself as and known my whole life was gone. I had always introduced myself as ‘Ollie the rugby player'. It took me 20 months of therapy and counselling once a week. It was an identity crisis, it was depression and it was anxiety about the future.
“It spiralled and affected lots of things in my life. I wasn’t interested in booze and drugs but I needed this feeling of being loved and adored so my attention was on women. That became a really negative thing because I couldn’t live up to my values of honesty and integrity. I never told lies but I wasn’t the person I wanted to be and it was fuelled by this need to be somebody.”
Phillips has forged a new identity through family and work but the courage that drove his glittering rugby career continues to inspire brutal physical pursuits. As well as his remarkable sailing feat and the North Pole expedition, Phillips has played the highest ever game of rugby approximately 6,300m up Mount Everest, cycled across America, climbed Africa’s highest mountain and ran the world’s most gruelling marathon in Sierra Leone. His adventures have supported charities such as Wooden Spoon, Street Child, Alzheimer's Society and Cancer Research UK.
“I really enjoy the community, the challenge and the sense of achievement,” Phillips insists. “That’s what makes it all special. I try to do these things as part of a team experience to allow people to explore leadership, behaviours and cultures which I love.”
A desire to push his skillset to the brink perhaps made the transition from sports star to director at multinational PwC less daunting for Phillips than most. But there was still an inevitable sense of imposter syndrome after swapping the bright lights of Twickenham for the boardroom and he enrolled in an Executive MBA at Cambridge University to learn his new craft.
“All the skills I had learned playing were totally irrelevant,” he admitted. “I was sitting in meetings not knowing what everyone was talking about. It was totally useless how many people I could knock over at the photocopy machine or how many flights of stairs I could run up! I was used to being an industry expert and then I really wasn't so it was tough. It took me around five years to feel comfortable in that environment.”
Phillips now enjoys the contentment in life that seemed so elusive immediately after retirement from rugby. But with so much still left to achieve, there is no time for rest.
