Nine women shaped by a University of Hertfordshire-led coaching programme will take their places at this month’s Winter Olympics, marking a quiet but significant shift in elite sport leadership.
The women, drawn from seven countries, are graduates of the Women in Sport High-Performance (WISH) programme and will be part of the Milano–Cortina Winter Games from 6–22 February. Some will coach from the sidelines, others will lead teams behind the scenes – and one will compete for gold.
Led by the University of Hertfordshire, supported by the International Olympic Committee’s Olympic Solidarity department and delivered by Females Achieving Brilliance (FAB), WISH was created to tackle one of elite sport’s most stubborn imbalances: the lack of women in top-level coaching roles. Despite near gender parity among athletes, women still account for just 13% of elite coaches globally.
Since launching, the 21-month programme has graduated 120 women from 22 sports and 59 countries. This Olympic cycle, nine of them will be working across bobsleigh, skeleton, biathlon, skiing and curling at the Games.
Three graduates are involved in bobsleigh and skeleton, including Swiss team coach Elfje Willemsen, Romanian team leader Ticu Elena Sorina, and Joska le Conte, head coach and technical director of the Dutch team. Two others are working in biathlon roles for Canada and Latvia.
Italy’s Federica Tonon will serve as an event supervisor, while compatriot Nadia Bortoluzzi is departures manager for both the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Jacqueline Stark completes the group as team leader for the Austrian ski team.
British curler Jennifer Dodds represents a different strand of the programme’s impact. A WISH graduate who continues to compete while developing her coaching career, Dodds returns to the Olympic ice as a defending gold medallist following Team GB’s triumph in Beijing in 2022.
“When the Winter Games were here in 2018, around 10 per cent of the coaches were women,” she said.
“But looking around now, there’s at least six to eight female coaches sitting on the bench at the curling, so that’s already an improvement. Hopefully we can keep boosting that number, and programmes like WISH can definitely help with that.”
The programme is directed by Professor Elizabeth Pike, Global Winner of the IOC’s 2024 Gender Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Champions Award. She says WISH is less about individual confidence-building and more about structural change.
“The WISH programme is very much about not fixing the woman but fixing the system,” she said. “We work with participants to identify the tools, resources and support they need to succeed – not just as coaches, but as leaders.
“The coaches from WISH are not only changing their own careers. They are challenging cultures and systems in their sports and countries, demonstrating the real value of gender equality.”
As Milano–Cortina shapes up to be the most gender-balanced Winter Olympics in history, the presence of these nine graduates offers a glimpse of what progress looks like when leadership finally starts to catch up with talent.
The sixth international cohort of WISH participants will arrive at the University of Hertfordshire next month for an intensive residential programme, concluding just ahead of International Women’s Day on 8 March.
