Journalist and podcaster
Karenjeet Kaur Bains holds the accolade of being the first female Sikh powerlifter to represent Team GB but she's also a passionate and pioneering individual. Her ultimate aim is to drive change and smash stereotypes. Traditionally powerlifting has been male-dominated and not one you’d expect to find someone from a Sikh background, but she has … Continue reading Team GB’s first female Sikh powerlifter
David Haze is a multiple world record holder for paddleboarding, but that all came after a descent into crime and drugs, which also saw him on the run from police. While on the run his mental health crashed as he faced up to the situation he had gotten into - he even tried to take … Continue reading David Haze: Crime, prison & paddleboarding
Middle-distance runner Andy McAslan was diagnosed with Stage Four Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and was undergoing immuno-chemotherapy in 2021. Despite having symptoms for around six months it’s highly likely that he could have had the disease for around three to four years prior. His illness is also incurable. Even if remission is achieved the illness will still … Continue reading Andy McAslan’s cancer battle
Three years after SportSpiel's initial Mental Health Awareness Week in 2018 we brought the series back, as we felt it was especially important amid the Covid pandemic. We released five episodes in five days with a mix of personal stories and group conversations on different topics. Our first episode was themed around addiction and featured … Continue reading Mental Health Awareness Week 2021
Running the HertsLive site through the pandemic was one of the toughest assignments of my journalism career. When taking over the day-to-day running of the site - ahead of its launch in March 2020 - it was doing around 1.4million page views a month. In January 2021 we hit a new record with 7.2million page … Continue reading HertsLive – from 1.4m to 7.2m page views
It has long been an ambition of mine to host a series dedicated to women's football and telling the stories of the players involved. On SportSpiel we created a spin-off series dubbed the Women's Football Diary, which launched with six weekly episodes to coincide with the start of the 2020-2021 WSL. The footballers we interviewed … Continue reading The Women’s Football Diary
This episode is one of our proudest pieces of work on SportSpiel. Organised in conjunction with The Mintridge Foundation and Limitless, this episode homed in on an incredibly important discussion – body image in women’s sport. Joining us as guests were Olympic gold medal-winning Great Britain hockey captain Kate Richardson-Walsh, as well as England Rugby … Continue reading Kate Richardson-Walsh, Zoe Harrison and Justine Lucas: Body image in women’s sport
Race, stereotypes and healing divisions are issues that have surged to the front of the public's consciousness in 2020. In light of the Black Lives Matter movement, and seemingly endless levels of abuse on social media, conquering hate and outdated attitudes has become a vitally important battle in society. Alice Dearing is one athlete who … Continue reading Alice Dearing: Being the black swimmer from Britain
Launching the new HertsLive site in the midst of a global pandemic is not something I envisaged. Having taken the job of Digital Lead just three weeks before launch day, I knew there would be significant challenges, but this was something else. What followed was the hardest – yet most rewarding – three months in … Continue reading Three months of HertsLive – and the pandemic goes on
This episode of SportSpiel will always stand out to me and Will as we explored the destructive power of a gambling addiction. As part of The Mintridge Foundation’s #28NotOut – raising money for the Max Hunter Fund - Patrick Foster came onto our podcast to open up in a truly remarkable way. The ex-cricketer was plagued for years … Continue reading Patrick Foster’s gambling addiction
I first met Middlesex and Scotland cricketer Olivia Rae at Lords in February 2020 after we were introduced over email by a mutual contact. It was one of those meetings where you instantly click, and she explained a number of ambitions she had after going through a challenging time mentally. Not only did she want … Continue reading Olivia Rae: How to build a mental health support network
British sailor Eilidh McIntyre had always dreamed of going to the Olympics. Her dad is a former gold medallist from Seoul 1988 and she was one of the favourites, along with her teammate Hannah Mills, to do something special in Tokyo before the Games were postponed for a year. At the start of March, SportSpiel … Continue reading Eilidh McIntyre: ‘I was broken, that’s the only way I can describe it’
Alasdair Hooper 