How an Olympic swimmer is using his coaching skills to ease stress in the boardroom

Former athlete David Carry talks to Andy Martin about how he is using biometrics to help stressed-out FTSE 100 employees

David Carry giving a talk to business people (Track Record)

David Carry first learned to swim aged three in the chilly waters off Aberdeen. Without a wetsuit. It must have made everything he did afterwards seem relatively easy. “I loved the water,” he says. “A lot of my identity was wrapped up in being the swimmer.” When he was 10 he got a new headmaster – Ian Black, Olympic swimmer and BBC Sports Personality of the Year 1958 – and his sporting destiny was sealed. Now, with Track Record, aged 38, Carry is taking lessons from the poolside out to the wider world.

“I loved the transparency of swimming,” he says. Input and output were clearly aligned. “I knew that if you’d done the work, you were more likely to get the result.” In those days (before he married open water specialist and double world champion Keri-anne Payne) he preferred the clarity of the pool to murky open water. “If it didn’t smell of chlorine and I couldn’t see the bottom, I didn’t trust it.” All his friends would come and watch him swim and he gradually built up confidence in the pool and beyond.

Then in 2004, aged 22, he was picked for the Athens Olympic squad, swimming in the relay. A tremendous high was followed by a devastating low when he was dropped at the last minute for the final. He picked himself up and went on to win two golds at the following Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.