[Physio Explained] Working as a Physiotherapist at the 2026 Winter Olympics with Dr Tim Retchford

In this episode with Tim Retchford we discuss his recent experience of working with the athletes at the 2026 Winter Olympics. We discuss:

• Key Roles of the Physiotherapist in this environment
• Working with Olympic athletes in the lead up to the Olympic Games 
• Working in a Multidisciplinary Environment
• How a Physiotherapist can enhance team rapport and dynamics
• What you can do to help break into working with elite sport

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Dr Tim Retchford is a Sports and Exercise Physiotherapist and Lecturer at Charles Sturt University, Australia. Tim coordinates and teaches the musculoskeletal subjects at Charles Sturt University along with working on research projects in partnership with University of Canberra, Snow Australia and Albury Wodonga Health. Outside of his role as a lecturer, Tim has maintained his clinical practice, particularly in elite sport as he has worked with the Australian Cross Country Ski team for the past 15+ years. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

If you're interested in elite sport, you really need to have an intimate knowledge of that sport. You don't need to be amazingly good at it, but you do need to understand all the nuances of it. You need to understand what the typical trainings that you could be doing, but you need to understand all of the lingo associated with that sport. Otherwise, a competitor is going to see that you really don't get it.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Welcome back to Physio Explained, the Physio Network podcast where we explore the ideas, experiences, and clinical insights shaping modern physiotherapy practice today. In today's episode, we're taking a behind-the-scenes look at physiotherapy at the Olympic Games, with a particular focus on the Winter Olympics and Elite skiing. I'm joined by Tim Redford, an experienced sports physiotherapist who has worked extensively in elite winter sports and supported athletes through the Olympic cycle. Tim has spent many years working with elite cross-country ski athletes, including the Australian cross-country ski team, and brings a deep understanding of the physical demands and injury challenges unique to snow sports. Before moving fully into physiotherapy and high-performance sports, Tim was also a competitive cross-country skier himself, which gives him a unique insight into both the performance and medical sides of elite winter sport. In this episode, we explore what physiotherapy at the Olympic Games really looks like and how it's far more than just two weeks of competition. Tim explains how the work actually spans the entire four-year Olympic cycle, supporting athletes in preparation, qualification, and performance. And to finish, Tim shares a few practical tips for clinicians interested in breaking into elite sports and working in high performance environments. You're going to love this episode. There is loads for you to unpick. I'm James Armstrong and this is Physio Explained. Tim, great to have you on the Physio Explained podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks, James. Thanks for having me. So we're going to be talking about a really fascinating topic because obviously it's quite, well, it's very prevalent in the moment in terms of the Winter Olympics. We're going to be talking about physio involvement in the Olympic Games. So, Tim, can you just start by giving us a brief overview of your involvement and where you're coming from with an experience point of view and Olympic cycles?

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Yeah, absolutely. My involvement with the snow sports has been quite extensive. I previously was a ski athlete in cross-country skiing, and when I finished that, I suppose I recognised how much support that I got and wondered how I could maybe get back to that sport. So I volunteered to be the physio team physio for um cross-country skiing in Australia for probably at least 15 years, which has given me a lot of pleasure. Interestingly, though, that this game is the last one in Milano Cortina was actually the first involvement that I've had actually at a Olympic Games. And that came about mostly because it was a decentralized game. So instead of having one hub where you had a medical team, in this case, we actually had six medical teams spread out around that Tina and various other parts of northern Italy. And it meant the area that I was working in, the Valdefiam in a town called Pradazzo, that we only had cross-country skiing athletes in that area. And so it made sense that given my involvement with the team over such a long period of time, that I'd be the natural fit to be able to support those athletes.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

Brilliant, brilliant. So uh one of the things we wanted to talk about today was that obviously that involvement, you said this is the first time that you actually have been involved in the actual two-week event, but that's not what it's all about, is it? It's a much bigger role than that. Talk us through how big a role it is, and how many years do you work around that and up to that two-week climax, as it were?

SPEAKER_00 3:51

Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is probably the under-recognised part of our involvement as physiotherapist is that it really is a four-year cycle, and we look at it like that and we strategically plan for that. I suppose there is a lot of strategy because we have very few resources. And in many cases, I can't be overseas with the athletes. And so a lot of our work, and when I say our, I work very closely with Dr. Larry Trees, who's a sports physician. So a lot of our involvement would be consultations with athletes on telehealth, but also at trading camps, we try to get along to trading camps as much as we can. But we also pull in experts in areas of, for example, in nutrition, if we're thinking that there's a hole in understanding of our athletes and we think that there might be some great performance benefits from that, we um that we do that. And I suppose you've got to understand is that really our ability in Australia to support athletes, not only from providing them with snow, but also providing them with support, means that in many cases, we actually encourage athletes to look at other pathways to elite success. And what I mean by that is that many of our national team athletes are on scholarship in America. And in fact, our one of our best athletes won two NCAA titles this week, which is a first for Australia. We've had quite a few athletes over the years that have gone down that path. We've also got a whole bunch of them that live in Norway and train with Norwegians who are the world leaders in in cross-country skiing at the moment. So that's fantastic for them. But it certainly poses some challenges in terms of being able to establish and continue rapport with these athletes and also be able to provide services to them. And it certainly has refined my capacity to be able to do good telehealth and do good telehealth potentially with other involvement of health professionals as well.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Tim, talk us through kind of some of the examples. You've mentioned a couple of things there. So in maybe let's let's go sort of as the build-up to the games comes around. And I suppose if we talk about maybe the year to six months beforehand, how does the role change and what sort of things might you get involved with?

SPEAKER_00 6:12

One of the things that I really wanted to do was to make sure that I really um had a good rapport with all the athletes that were likely to make the team. So I organized a couple of meetings and they're probably like an hour long, and they really weren't physio-specific conversations. Of course, I was interested in knowing about current injuries, niggles, things in the past, if I hadn't got a good profile of that athlete. I suppose I was much more interested in sort of understanding how they tick and their interests and how how they thought we could help them achieve their goals. And I think that was probably one thing that I was kind of really mindful of is that thinking, you know, in this support role, like what can you do? What can you say that might actually be helpful for those athletes, you know, in the lead up, but also on race day? What are the things that you know that they would feel more comfortable with? And and maybe we'll discuss some of the sort of the day-to-day stuff at the games in a moment, but understanding this before you jump into that sort of pressure cookery environment of the Olympics, I thought was really important that at that stage, six, 12 months out, they're much more relaxed. And details like thinking about could we bring some say familiar foods from Australia to make them feel more comfortable in that environment and maybe to get a degree of sort of patriotism and team environments as well. And so, yeah, we had jars of bench mite and various different cereals that are more unique to Australia and shipped over and other things like recovery boots. And one of the things that was probably a it was a real team goal was to qualify for the team sprint, and the the team sprint is two people doing multiple laps of a 1.5 kilometer course. And it was an event in which we Australia had never qualified for the final. Part of that planning and maybe part of the psychology of building towards success was thinking, okay, we have to plan like we are going to make that final. And we need to think about if we when we make that final, what are we going to do? What do the other teams do? And what advantages do you think that they have? And it was little things like they wanted to have their legs shaken down between each leg that they did. That we had an exercise bike out there so they could warm up and cool down between legs and so forth. And I mean, in fact, the bike actually didn't get used, but it was almost a token of that sort of psychology of saying we actually are heading to these games, planning on qualifying, and we've actually put everything in place to make sure that we uh that we can be successful.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

Yeah, it kind of was creating that positive mindset and working towards something that's going to happen, not the if.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

Totally. I mean, as you'd know, James, from your involvement with sport, is that really our role as a physio, it is so much of that of being able to foster team environment and being able to maybe pull people in from the periphery when we start to see that there might be some riffs in the team environment, which is inevitable because it's a stressful environment to be in, not just in the games themselves, but in the lead up to the games. And I think that is probably sort of an underrated part of what we do. And I think as physios, we're quite skillful about understanding psychology and recognizing things and also coming up with strategies that you think might be quite helpful to be able to improve team dynamics, but also personal performance as well. And I think that tapping into that, it's I think is yeah, for us at least, was probably one of the things that I think that we could be really proud of as a team. But I arrived 10 days before the Olympics, and the athletes had just done a World Cup beating in Goms in in Switzerland. And one of our athletes had come last, and he'd he was last by 47 seconds, which is a huge margin over a sprint event. Amazingly, this guy remained incredibly positive after that. And, you know, we looked at all the factors that might have influenced why he had such a poor performance. But it was certainly not ideal to have such a poor performance in a very short period of time before your biggest race of your life. Now he kept training it. You know, we worked up his sort of recovery strategies and definitely reduced his load in collaboration with coaching staff. As we headed closer to his key event, the team sprint, things started to come together. And the day before we're filming him, and it was like he was floating on the snow. On the day he actually qualified fourth, which was something that was in completely out of the box for someone coming from Australia. He was only 2.9 seconds behind the winner over quite an equitable length of time. So yeah, of course, there are lots of things at play in through there, but that a capacity to be able to support someone, remain optimistic, and really help that person along in that journey and to have such a massive turnaround in capacity performance was yeah, it was amazing. And that was actually probably one of, for me, was one of the highlights in terms of having someone just be able to go from rock bottom to getting the best result that they've ever had in their life was quite incredible over such a short period of time. Are you struggling to keep up to date with new research?

SPEAKER_01 11:26

Let our research reviews do the hard work for you. Our team of experts summarise the latest and most clinically relevant research for instant application in your clinic. So you can save time and effort keeping up to date. Click the link in the show notes to try Physio Network's research reviews for free today. I think the thing that's standing out to me, Tim, as well is the amount of coaching skills that you're having to bring to the role. Not coaching the skill of the sport, but coaching the athlete in the environment and fostering that positivity and everything around it. So it's a huge skill outside of just the physio element of it, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 12:03

Absolutely. But I think that we do that really well as physios. It's kind of how do we motivate people to exercise and how do we reassure people that perhaps their condition is not as bad as they expected. And I think that you're really taking a lot of the elements of day-to-day physio and really just applying some of that in terms of an elite sporting population. So I I don't actually think that it's necessarily too different to perhaps what we hope to or aspire to do as physios day-to-day.

SPEAKER_01 12:32

No, absolutely. Yeah, hit hitting the nail on the head there. Let's go towards the games then. So you you said there you arrived 10 days out from the games. Talk us through, obviously, we haven't got anywhere near enough time to go into the nitty-gritty, but talk us through about how does that role change and what are the key things you're involved with that short lead up and then during the game time.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

We actually have a hub in Europe. Australia has this European training hub, which is in Veraci, just outside of Milan. So we s the whole team met up there. This is a fantastic resource, which means that if athletes are injured in when they're in Europe, instead of having to fly home, they've got we've got skilled medical backup there so they can come in through there. So we came there, got our uniforms and so forth, and then headed north to Toblack to for a training camp in northern part of Italy before we then came down back down to the games. I suppose coming back to like your multiple roles part, you know, and this is something that anyone who's worked in sport would probably understand is that yeah, sure, your physio role is key and important, and that's why you're there. But really, most of the day you you're on the tracks or doing other things. And I suppose my background in in skiing being and still being reasonably good at skiing was a distinct advantage. I could be helping athletes test skis. The skis are an incredibly important part of the of your performance. In fact, the top competitors would take 60 or 70 pairs of skis to the Olympics. So there's a degree of skiing them in, but also there's a lot of testing to decide, okay, all of that huge quiver of skis, what ones would you use for certain conditions and so forth. So that was probably an unusual part of my role is actually skiing. And I did a lot of skiing with the athletes, and of course, selfishly that was nice. But one of the things, one of the things that I think is fantastic from a rapport-building perspective is that sport, you know, whether it be riding with someone or running. You have very different conversations to what you would have if you are in a consulting room where I think there's an expectation of what we were going to say to each other. Whereas if you're in a completely different environment, still got you, but they still know you're the physio. The sort of conversations that you have will often be much more honest. I mean, sometimes and sometimes you can just be not having conversations at all, which is nice. And I think that builds that understanding of people and builds trust and builds rapport as well. So there was a lot of skiing, a lot of training, a lot of you standing on the side of the track and videoing and that providing that footage and analyzing the coaching staff, ski testing, and a lot of driving, as you could imagine, that's driving athletes to training and getting things and and going from place to place. So that's got a quite a busy period, and then you come into the games and and some of that sort of is reduced, but still they're the sort of the key elements. And I still did a lot of skiing with the athletes at the at the games as well. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

It's interesting, isn't it? And I think that's it helps in terms of your background and your ability to utilize your skills to to become part of the team even closer. This is great, which maybe a lot of physios working with elite athletes aren't always able to do. I mean, particularly running physio around that area, you're not necessarily going to be able to go out on the long run with some of the elite athletes. It's not going to be possible. So it's nice that you can actually have that um rapport-building time.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Yeah, and I think one of the key things, and I talked to my students about this, is that if you're going to go in, if you're interested in elite sport, you really need to have an intimate knowledge of that sport. You don't need to be amazingly good at it, but you do need to understand all the nuances of it. You need to understand what the typical trainings that you could be doing. You need to understand all of the lingo associated with that sport. Otherwise, a competitor is going to see that you really don't get it. And if you do have a background in something, it makes a lot of sense. That is something that you've got to leverage. I did a little bit of work in Australian rules football, and I realized I know very little about it, and I'm probably don't have the passion that other people in Australia do for it. And I wouldn't have made a particularly good physio at the elite AFL level. I think my physio skills would be sufficient. But I think that just understanding all of the drills and all of the strategy and so forth is something that I was missing. And I think that's a key. You really do need to have all of that to be the complete package.

SPEAKER_01 17:07

And I think also the empathy and appreciation of what the athletes are going through to some degree, I think massively helps or what it feels like to do those that training anywhere near that level. I think that that also must help somewhat.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

Yeah, I think so, isn't it? And just understanding the huge levels of fatigue that you get from training and that, you know, that is going to hugely affect your affect and your capacity in some cases to really converse. You're sort of almost like a zombie sometimes. And I think, you know, you've got to be careful you're not taking that personally when you're talking to people. There are just patches of time where you're going to be absolutely exhausted and and just allowing the athletes to just relax and not really probing too much. I think that there are times where you've got to recognise the ebbs and flows of their fatigue and and so forth.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

Absolutely. Tim, it's it's been really interesting to chat to you today. I think it'd be I'd be wrong for me to let you go without asking a question that some of our listeners probably have who maybe are new into physio or may haven't even graduated yet, in terms of how they go about getting into this arena, where do they start? Are there any tips that you would give anyone to start thinking about sooner rather than later?

SPEAKER_00 18:20

One of the things that I think it helps it tremendously is if you can identify a mentor, particularly as you're going through university, I think that can be very helpful. I was very lucky to have quite a few significant and influential people in my developing years, particularly some sports physicians in Melbourne that was uh that were really helpful. And they could be putting you in the helping put you in the path to sort of um opportunities. But I think that one thing, and I mean, this is still my role is a voluntary role. Of course, I've got most of my roles are not, but I think that being prepared to volunteer and start at the absolute grassroots, and then potentially if you have got the capacity, then the opportunities will generally arise to be able to sort of work your way up. But I think trying to surround yourself with people who are experts and can also help you and you can work collaboratively. One of the the sort of on the collaborative point that the doctor that I work with has said, Larry, we do a lot of stuff together, which has been an incredibly important part of my own personal development. And what I mean by that is that we would see most of our athletes who've got musculoscalar conditions, whether it be telehealth or in-person, we wouldn't see them as the three of us almost without exception. That I mean, from an outcome perspective for the athlete, it's absolutely amazing. But very from a personal perspective and a selfish perspective, the amount of learning you get, you could be sitting in your room for 20 years and thinking you're doing an amazing job, and all of a sudden you then start to work with someone who explains things better than you can, or differently to you can, and or has a few different tools at their disposal or looks at things slightly differently, and all of a sudden your learning just accelerates so much. And yeah, that was for me, from a professional perspective at the games, that was probably one of the highlights of being able to work with someone that you really respect, that you have no qualms in asking them questions. Um, and I think that you know I came away from the games with a fantastic experience, but a lot more knowledge as well that I can now apply with some of my athletes ongoing.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

Brilliant, really great. That's fantastic, Tim. Well, we've sadly run out of time, and I'm sure plenty of listeners will probably be looking you up now and seeing what you've done and how you've gone about it. So, again, uh just a big thank you for your time, Tim, today. And uh, I'm sure we may have to get you back on for an extended chat about all things Olympic games and elite sports. Be great.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

Thanks, Danny. It's a real pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 20:53

Thanks, Tim.