May 24, 2021

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SAFETY & HEALTH EXPO 2020

An audience with Amy Williams: coming this June

Amy Williams, MBE, made history when she won skeleton bobsleigh gold in the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, Britain’s first gold medal by a solo athlete for 30 years. With winter sports often overlooked in the UK, her achievement continued the run of medals in the event from the previous two Olympics and set the stage for future gold medals by British athletes in the next two Winter Olympic Games.

Amy Williams

Amy will be giving an inspirational keynote presentation at the virtual Workplace Wellbeing Conference on Wednesday 2 June, 2021. In her speech, Amy will share her take on wellbeing. As an Olympic athlete Amy worked on a four-year cycle, but she made sure she had weekly, monthly, and yearly targets. She suffered many setbacks, but always overcame them. She did this through evaluation, which she believes is key no matter what your line of work. Amy says “If COVID-19 has taught us anything it’s that we should concentrate on wellness. We should be taking care of ourselves mentally and physically, nourishing our bodies with wholesome food, having a good work/life balance.”

Starting her sporting career as a runner, Amy’s desire to achieve on the world stage led her to the often-overlooked winter sports. She focused on the skeleton bobsleigh; a ferociously fast event frequently likened to sliding on ice at 100mphon a metal tea tray. However, with few winter sports facilities and no ice track in the country, Amy was forced to train on a dry-push facility with a bespoke sled.

Required to help build and maintain her own equipment, testing the sled and spending hours in a wind tunnel in order to perfect her form enabled Amy, through trial-and-error, to learn all aspects of a sport in a way few competitors manage to do. Having learned technicalities, like the effect of air temperatures and the intricate mechanics of steering, Amy also took on the psychological and physical challenges and pressures of competing against better funded, more experienced sportspeople.

At the Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010, she set two track records, finishing more than half a second ahead of her closest competitor to secure the gold medal.

Amy will join a star-studded speaker line-up, which includes astronaut Tim Peake, former number 10 Director of Communications Alastair Campbell and Mind CEO Paul Farmer, who will all address mental health and wellbeing, with a focus on the workplace.

The Workplace Wellbeing Virtual Conference was part of a month-long virtual event called Connect, which included the virtual Safety & Health Expo and Workplace Wellbeing Show exhibitions, in 2021.

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