"They realise that I get them": How Alison Rose became physio to Olympic stars Keely Hodgkinson and Jessica Ennis-Hill

Alison Rose was an athlete herself back in the 1990s, running the marathon at world and European championships.

But it was with what she did after competing that she made such an indelible mark on British athletics – as a physiotherapist to some of Britain’s best-loved Olympians. Her role was so key in the gold-medal-winning performances of Holmes, Ennis-Hill and Hodgkinson that it is why the latter picked her out in the Stade de France two months ago for a selfie with her coach Trevor Painter after she had just won Olympic gold in the 800m.

“I was lucky enough to go and sit with the coaches, so it was brilliant and really nice to share that moment,” smiles Rose from her physiotherapy clinic in Leeds a few weeks later.

“It was a relief because that’s what we’ve all been working towards.”

Rose emphasises the word ‘all’ because throughout the course of the interview she is keen to stress that getting an athlete onto an Olympic podium is a team effort and she is just one small cog. But what a cog.

Rose was the physio who helped turn Holmes from a plucky, injury-plagued go-getter into a double Olympic champion.

She helped Ennis-Hill go injury free in the year before London and then rebuilt her body during and after pregnancy to make her world champion again.

It’s not only the great women, either. James Willstrop has been playing squash at a world-class level for two decades because Rose is part of his team.

Hodgkinson is just the latest in a long line of great British athletes. “Keely is really cool and wise beyond her years,” says Rose, who mixes working with the elite with weekend warriors at her Leeds practice.

“She’s like Kelly (Holmes) towards the end of her career, in terms of that racing brain and sensibility. Just really smart and unflappable, and really switched on.”

The pair have been working together for four years, Rose joining Hodgkinson and Painter around the time the then-18-year-old from Wigan was studying and training at Leeds Beckett University.

Hodgkinson is benefitting from the modern-day approach of athletes having big teams around them, which is a long way removed from the situation Rose walked into with Holmes in 2002. Back then she had only been working with British Athletics for two years having answered an SOS just 10 days before the Sydney Olympics to deputise for Neil Black, the physio, who had suffered a broken leg in an accident.

“I was living out in Australia at the time,” says Rose, who was born in Canada but raised in Surrey. “My old coach, Malcolm Brown, suggested they ask me. So I had this amazing phone call from Neil asking do I want to fill in at the Olympics, and of course I grabbed that with two hands.”

Rose was doing a part-time job at the English Institute of Sport when she started working with Holmes in the middle of the next Olympic cycle.

“She was at her wit’s end, she knew Athens would be her last chance,” says Rose.

“History had shown she just got injured and injured and injured, so she really bought into committing to the physio.

“I went out to South Africa a few times to see her, then she’d come up to Sheffield. And then in the last three or four months before Athens, Leeds Beckett were really good at giving her a place to stay on campus, so she could come up for physio, do her track sessions, go back for physio.

“Kelly’s coach at the time said you’re allowed to have niggles but you’re not allowed to have injuries. Staying on the niggles side makes a lot of difference.”

Perhaps Rose’s most famous client was Ennis-Hill.

The Sheffield heptathlete had suffered her own injury torment when between 2011 and 2012 she went injury free and won world championship and Olympic gold.

Developing a plan to get her back to that level after childbirth was a feat of physiotherapy that helped lay a blueprint for future female sports stars to follow.

“We knew she wanted to come back and go to the world champs in 2015 and the Olympics the following year, so we had a programme in place during the pregnancy to make sure we were on top of those changes,” says Rose.

“The body markedly changes around week eight of the pregnancy, all the ligaments in your body are affected. Things get a lot looser after week eight, which was a lot earlier than I expected, so we were able to increase hip stability and foot strength.

“After the birth, we needed to work on her abb strength. It’s about training all your muscles to work together to make sure you’re not getting any issues around that core, which for a multi-eventer is crucial.

“I was talking to her coach Toni Minichiello three times a week, if not more. He was absolutely fantastic at making sure we weren’t going to do things wrong.

“He was really good at listening to advice, getting doctors involved, strength and conditioning all tailored towards it.

“She went on and won the world champs in 2015, which for me was an incredible performance from where she had been.

“A lot of athletes are nervous about pregnancy, but if you just take it step by step and take into account that increased laxity and how your tummy muscles change, it’s about not rushing it and having faith in that process.”

Over time, the relationship she has with her athletes has grown stronger, and they have become more dependent on her.

Whether it be weekly sessions, or just knowing that sometimes when giving a soft-tissue massage, all the athlete needs is silence and calmness.

“I think they realise that I get them,” says Rose, who has worked with everyone from the Leeds-based Olympic divers to triathlon’s Brownlee brothers. “It’s not just a job because I don’t think you can do it at that level without having that passion.

“They trust that I will do my absolute best to get them to the startline.

“If I was to ring Trevor and say look Keely has got an issue, we need to back off for a few days, he’ll totally listen and he’ll want to know what the problem is, what we can do to improve it. There’s never any question of trust. To get performance you want to be injury free as long as possible and I think that’s where the physio comes in.

“I’ll see pretty much every single elite athlete I work with on a weekly basis, whether they’re injured or not and some of that is to build up a relationship with them so I know their body, how it moves.

“The physio is such an important role, but for all the athletes I’ve worked with, the best have generally been the ones with a really good team behind them because you can’t do it on your own, there will be times when you have to call the doctor.”