07-05-2025
Former Olympian Lynsey Sharp reveals she is expecting baby No 2 as she reflects with pride on a career that mixed euphoric highs with deflating lows
Taking it easy is not in Lynsey Sharp's DNA.
The Olympian, a European champion and Commonwealth Games medal winner, is halfway around a Manchester park in a race against her three-year-old son, Max. Stopping to catch her breath, she reveals to Mail Sport that she recently hung up her running spikes for a very special reason.
'I've actually not run for the last four months because we're having another baby in the summer,' she says, adding, 'I stopped because I didn't find it comfortable anymore.'
The 800m runner announced her retirement from athletics over a year ago after a career marked by stunning successes but also by serious injury. But Sharp is not planning to stop training permanently any time soon.
In fact, rather than decreasing her mileage, she has just signed up for her first ever marathon, egged on by her friend and fellow Scots athlete Eilish McColgan, who took eighth place in her marathon debut in London two weeks ago.
And this despite Sharp confessing that the half marathon she ran in 2024 — her longest ever distance — 'almost killed me'. She said: 'The last three miles were painful. But I really enjoyed having a goal.'
In addition to relocating to Manchester last month with her husband, Dunblane-born athlete Andrew Butchart, looking after their son and preparing for a new baby, Sharp is busy studying for a Masters in sports marketing and media, has recently qualified as a coach, and is already weighing up her next career move.
She is brimming with ideas and enthusiasm — possibilities include a job in marketing for a sports brand, the media, being an agent and coaching young athletes.
Sharp is warm, engaging and refreshingly outspoken, and it is clear retirement and motherhood have done nothing to dull the fiercely competitive spirit which helped propel her to a string of impressive achievements despite more than her fair share of injuries and illness.
She freely admits that though she loves her 'incredible' son, giving birth to him does not compare to the high of winning races. 'A lot of people say, 'when your child's born, that'll be the best day of your life',' she says, adding: 'For me, that experience, I wouldn't say it was the best experience.'
As the daughter of athletes (her mum, Carol, competed in the 1982 Commonwealth Games, and her dad, Cameron, was an elite 200 metre sprinter), Sharp says she is often asked if she will encourage her son to get involved in sport.
'I've had some fantastic experiences in my career, but I also know the other side of it, like how difficult it is to make it professionally as an athlete and how unstable it is,' she says. 'And then also how difficult it is at 30 to then have to retire and find something new. It will be up to him.'
Sharp has spent the past year working for a financial services company and though she stresses 'it was a fantastic experience, I genuinely learned a lot about myself', she admits that it came as something of a culture shock to go from being out on the track to sitting at a desk five days a week.
Her proudest moment was winning silver at the 2014 Commonwealth Games before a home crowd in Glasgow. The race was dubbed 'a miracle' because Sharp had been violently ill with norovirus the night before and had been rushed to the hospital in the Commonwealth Games village. Despite a sleepless night spent vomiting, she got out of her hospital bed the next morning determined to go ahead with the race. 'There was absolutely no way that I was going to miss it,' she says, looking back.
In the event she pulled off a sensational run, coming from behind to take second place in a nail-biting finish. 'The power of the crowd got me through that race,' she says. 'It was like they were my superpower pushing me down the track.' Two weeks later she picked up another silver medal at the European Championships in Zurich, with a time of 1:58.80. '2014 was like the dream year for me,' she said.
That year might have been the high point of her career, but it was against medical advice that she competed at all that season after surgery for a calf injury left her with a chronically infected wound, which was so serious Sharp was in a wheelchair and feared she might lose her foot.
'Decisions like that come with experience,' she says. 'As an athlete, you start to know your body. And you know when you can push the boundaries and when you can't.'
Two years before that, she won silver at the European Championships in Helsinki behind Russian athlete Yelena Arzhakova. But Sharp was later declared the race winner after the Russian was suspended for two years after testing positive for a banned substance. Sharp was delighted with the win but admitted that the circumstances took the sheen off her victory.
Running her personal best of 1:57.69 in the 800m at the 2016 Olympics in Rio was another highlight, though the event was again marred by controversy. Sharp came sixth in the race, which was won by Caster Semenya, the South African athlete born with differences of sexual development (DSD), who dominated her sport between 2009 and 2019.
Asked after the race how she felt about competing against hyperandrogenic, or intersex, athletes, Sharp said 'it was difficult to compete against Caster Semenya and other hyperandrogenic athletes after the rule to suppress testosterone levels was overturned.'
Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi took silver in the race and Kenya's Margaret Wambui won bronze — all three women were born with DSD and were later revealed to have had elevated testosterone levels.
There were calls from some quarters to strip the winners of their medals. But all three athletes competed within the rules in place at the time, after the International Olympic Committee took the controversial decision in 1999 to abandon compulsory gender verification, making it possible for intersex athletes to compete without testosterone suppression.
Though she was far from the most outspoken athlete, Sharp found herself caught up in the media storm surrounding Semenya, who was reported as female at birth but underwent male puberty. Sharp was attacked on social media, was subjected to threats and warned never to set foot in South Africa.
Looking back on it, Sharp said, 'It was a really difficult situation. It felt like the governing bodies could had dealt with it better.'
The controversy continues. New rules were introduced in 2023 which stated that anyone who has undergone male puberty is barred from the female category, after research found that, even after taking medication to suppress their testosterone, trans women retained an advantage in strength, endurance, power and lung capacity.
In February this year, World Athletics, the governing body which oversees the sport globally, approved the introduction of a test to determine if an athlete is biologically female, due to 'new evidence which clarifies there is already an athletically significant performance gap before the onset of puberty.'
In her 2023 autobiography, Semenya criticised Sharp, whom she had been competing against since they were juniors, characterising her as a sore loser and accusing her of behaving badly. She wrote, 'Sharp looked at me as though I was less than human.'
Every time the issue is back in the spotlight, Sharp says that her name and 2016 comments are dragged up again. It's ironic that, as a law undergraduate at Edinburgh's Napier University, Sharp wrote her dissertation on this very subject, titled 'Intersex Athletes in Sport: The Regulatory Framework, and the Legal Implications.'
Sharp would like to put the subject behind her. 'I don't follow what goes on anymore. I don't have any interest in the discussion. It's a debate that's going to go on for years and years to come. No one's winning. It's just a really complicated situation.'
In 2019, Sharp took a break from athletics after surgery to remove pre-cancerous cells detected during a routine smear exam. She talks with regret about the 'wasted years' during Covid when she, in common with other athletes and sportspeople the world over, continued to train hard but could not compete.
'No one was able to do anything, the Olympics got postponed and sadly, as an athlete, the clock's ticking, you're getting older and the more little niggles and injuries I got, the more fed up I got.'
After she gave birth to her son in 2021, she returned to athletics but six months later her training was thrown off course when she got a stress fracture in her sacrum, a bone at the base of the spine, a common injury in female athletes post-partum. By the time she came back in 2023, she had missed three seasons. She raced indoors and outdoors that season but, by the end of the summer, she knew instinctively that the time had come for her to retire.
Finances played a part in her decision after her sponsorship agreement with Adidas ended and she was dropped from funding by British Athletics. 'Adidas didn't renew my contract,' she explains. 'So, there was only so long that I felt like I could carry on doing it, not making any money.
'I found that I can't pay out for childcare to do something, you know, and I'm not getting paid to do it. So, I think physically I probably could have carried on for a couple more years, but such is life.'
Ultimately, she is thankful that she wasn't forced out by injury. She adds: 'In my athletics career, I worked so hard day in, day out, and it was amazing when you got the results, but that's a small percentage of the amount of time that you felt you put in the work and didn't get the results. So, the highs were great, but the lows were terrible.'
Does she feel a sense of relief that some of that pressure is behind her now?
'Sometimes I miss it, and then sometimes I'm like, 'oh, I'm really glad I don't have to do that anymore, and no one's checking how fast I'm running, or judging my performances',' she says. 'But when you've done it for so long, you crave that. I'm very results driven, and performance focused, and it's hard to replicate that in life outside of athletics.'
Athletics was never a given for Sharp. Her parents — who met at Moray House in Edinburgh when they were training to become PE teachers — never pressured her to follow in their footsteps, and always encouraged her to have a fall-back career. At Mary Erskine, a private school for girls in the Scottish capital, Sharp enjoyed playing hockey and skied at Hillend dry ski slope.
It was through her older sister that she became increasingly drawn to athletics. She has always been fiercely competitive and gravitated towards athletics partly because she enjoyed it but mostly because she was good at it.
She reveals that her career was almost derailed before it got started. She explained: 'I had quite a few injuries when I started university, and I can so clearly remember walking on the beach in Rothesay with my mum.
'And I was injured at the time and missed the summer season, and I turned to her and I was like, 'I don't know if I want to do this anymore'. Within two years of that, I made my first Olympic team in London.
'There are so many people that are lost to sport through that. But I was fortunate enough to have people on my team that encouraged me to stick at it, and it was definitely worth it.'
She isn't sure how the next few years will pan out but says she is learning not to look too far ahead. Motherhood has made her a better person, she says. 'It forces you to slow down. As an athlete you are selfish, you put yourself first and you spend a lot of time on your own — travelling and training.
'And you're always like, what's next, what do I want to achieve, where am I going? As a mum you learn to let your child enjoy what they're doing, and just like be in the moment. It's very different.'
Laughing, she recalls a recent conversation she had with her mum, 'Max at the moment is not great at losing. And it's awful because that was me when I was a kid and I recently asked my mum, 'when did I grow out of that?' She said, 'I'm not sure you did'.'
