Adam Rattenberry was on hand for athletes at the recent Welsh Indoor Championships. Pic: Owen Morgan.

The Healing Hands That Carry Welsh Medal Hopes To The Start Line . . . “Secret Weapon” Adam Rattenberry

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The Commonwealth Games are only five months away, meaning Welsh track and field athletes are honing their plans and preparation for Birmingham. As part of a busy summer, their hopes, dreams and fears are placed in the hands of those they trust – such as the healing hands that belong to former Cardiff City physio Adam Rattenberry, as Owen Morgan discovered.

One name will keep cropping up time and again if you talk to Wales’ elite athletes for any length of time – physiotherapist Adam Rattenberry.

In a sport where any number of injuries are just a mistimed throw or misplaced step away, Rattenberry is a key figure within Welsh Athletics.

National coach Chris Jones has described him as his “right hand man” while Wales and Great Britain international Jenny Nesbitt calls him “Welsh Athletics’ secret weapon”.

Cardiff athlete Nesbitt, who has been in outstanding recent form, added: “I honestly wouldn’t be able to maintain the consistent training I do without him. He gives so much of his time. It’s unbelievable, really.”

The secret weapon tag is an accurate one as much of Rattenberry’s work is unseen, carried out in small treatment rooms and offices beyond the glare of major competitions, but it is far from unappreciated by the athletes.

Tokyo Olympics 1500m finalist Jake Heyward has previously spoken of Rattenberry’s influence on his early career, especially in the build up to the Cardiff athlete’s 1500m gold medal winning performances at the European Youth Championships in 2016 and Under-20 Championships in 2017.

Now based with Oregon Track Club Elite in the United States, Heyward once said of Rattenberry: “Adam has had a massive impact. The year I did the European Youths I actually didn’t have a winter because I was that injured.

“Then I got introduced to Adam and he helped develop a programme with my coach for my return and making sure my body was always in a good place.

Jenny Nesbitt has described Adam Rattenberry as Welsh Athletics’ “secret weapon”.

“Obviously, I was able to do well at the European youths and the same with the European Juniors.

”If it wasn’t for Adam, it genuinely could have been a different story.”

Heyward’s tale is just one of many I have heard from athletes, coaches and administrators in Wales.

Rattenberry’s job title at Welsh Athletics gives some insight into the scale and breadth of his responsibilities which go beyond physiotherapy.

However, even the title of “lead performance physiotherapist and athlete services manager” doesn’t begin to cover it.

“It’s definitely a hectic job!” concedes the man himself as we chat during a rare quiet moment at the National Indoor Athletics Centre in Cardiff.

“My role is primarily as a hands-on treating physio for our athlete support programme. The other side of my job is leading on athlete services.

“We support athletes with strength and conditioning, psychology support, nutrition support, performance analysis, soft tissue therapy . . .” says Rattenberry, who I get the impression ends the sentence well before he completes the list.

“We look at the needs of the athletes and what services will help them in their performance goals – how they move forwards and close performance gaps.

“Chris (Jones), and I work very closely between support services and coaching on how we close those performance gaps.”

Adam Rattenberry.

Meeting the needs of such a wide range of athletes – from shot putters to pole vaulters and sprinters to race walkers – is a huge and varied undertaking.

Especially when you consider a large number of athletes on the Welsh athlete support programme are scattered around the whole of the United Kingdom and beyond, with a number, like Heyward, based in the United States.

“There’s a fair amount of travel to see the athletes in the UK,” says Rattenberry. “But we’ve also got athletes in America that are on our support programme.

“We either support them remotely or virtually or they come to Cardiff to access support when they come back to the UK. We have athletes far and wide.

“Predominantly, I’m working here in NIAC supporting day-to-day delivery of physiotherapy for our athletes, I’ve got another physio Oliver (Wilding), who works part time for us as well.

“Between us, we lead on working out how we support our athletes here in the UK – warm weather training camps, competition support . . .” again Rattenberry trails off before he competes the lengthy list.

“And then over the last 18 months, we’ve been working closely with our partners at Sport Wales and Team Wales as well to champion athletics and try and get athletics going again, after the lockdowns and during the restrictions.

“And that’s taken up quite a few hours a week. Lots of admin stuff, lots of planning, and then the day-to-day hands-on delivery work.

“Our athlete support programme is track and field based, but incorporates the road and marathon athletes as well. It’s centred around the Commonwealth Games.

“So, we have different levels of the programme, but we have athletes across all event groups, from marathon to long jump on our support programme.”

 

If that wasn’t enough of a challenge, the whole operation became even more complicated when the pandemic struck two years ago.

The former Cardiff City physio says: “Covid just made it even more hectic – trying to support our athletes as best we could.

“There was a period during the initial lockdown where everything went virtual. We weren’t able to do the normal jobs that we were employed to do supporting our athletes.

“We had to think on our feet. We had to become innovative in the way that we supported our athletes at that critical time.

“At that point the Tokyo Olympics were still on the cards, nothing had been cancelled. So, we still had to run our athlete support programme in a slightly different way than we’d ever had to before.

“But then things did start to ease off for us and we were permitted back into supporting athletes face-to-face, which is where we’ve been since July last year.

“We’re back in as normal now. Obviously, still working in full PPE and all the restrictions that we still have, but we’re back supporting our athletes as best we can.

“And obviously looking ahead to the summer.”

Ah yes, the summer.

The 2022 outdoor season will arguably be the most hectic in the history of the sport.

Adam Rattenberry at the treatment table.

In addition to all the usual meetings and national championships, this summer also features three of the biggest global championships in the sport, due to cancellations and rescheduling.

The World Athletics Championships, the Commonwealth Games and the European Athletics Championships, will all be staged in the space of just over a month between July 15 and August 21.

Some of Wales’ top athletes are already trying to work out whether the demands of their respective events and the condensed nature of the schedule will allow them to compete at one, two or all three of the championships.

But there will be no picking and choosing for Rattenberry. He will have athletes under his care competing in America, Birmingham and Germany.

While the Commonwealth Games will be his main focus with Wales sending a full team to Birmingham, he will also need to consider the needs of Welsh athletes selected to represent Great Britain at the World Championships in Oregon and the European Championships in Munich.

“Primarily this summer will be focused on supporting our Welsh athletes in reaching the Commonwealth Games and at the Games,” says Rattenberry.

“But also getting as many athletes as we can on that World Championship team and then the European Championships team straight after Commonwealth Games.

“Our lead-in to the Commonwealth Games, the support, the holding camp, will start pretty much in line with the World Championships.

“We’ll probably have athletes out in Oregon while we’re preparing for Commonwealth Games, then we’ll be bringing everybody together for the Games in Birmingham.

“We’ll then be supporting athletes’ transition from Birmingham over to the Europeans.

Dewi Griffiths says Adam Rattenberry helped diagnose a mystery illness which threatened his career.

“So yeah, I don’t think we’ll be getting much holiday time until August, September time!”

Such a logistical headache must involve a planning operation of military proportions?

“Absolutely!” agrees Rattenberry. “Our motto from an athletics point of view is that we want to be as well prepared as any team in Birmingham.

“So, there’s a lot of planning going into looking at which athletes may be involved in Oregon. How do they get there? How do they get back to Birmingham? How do they turn up in Birmingham as best prepared as possible?

“And then how do we best prepare the team leading into Birmingham so that they can optimise their performance there?

“And then we have half an eye on how they transition out of Birmingham to represent GB at the Europeans.

“There’s also a lot of work going on at the moment around getting people over the line, because we’ve still got athletes looking to get qualification standards or nomination standards. We’ll have a better idea of the team, probably June time.

“At that point all of our planning really starts to kick in with regards to final competitions, final preparation, holding camp, and then that critical window of seven to 10 days leading into the Games.”

Rattenberry himself is no stranger to elite competition. The 37-year-old from Exeter was a competitive swimmer until 2002 when he decided his future may lie in physiotherapy and he enrolled at Cardiff University. He has been in the city ever since.

 

Having graduated in 2005, he worked within the NHS for a period before deciding he wanted to work in a sporting environment.

Within 18 months he was working in professional football and was with Cardiff City’s first team for almost 10 years.

During that time came the opportunity to work as a physio supporting competitors at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in 2014, which eventually led to him becoming Welsh Athletics’ first ever full-time physiotherapist

The job may be a huge undertaking but it is one that Rattenberry relishes and enjoys.

“I love the job,” he enthuses. “It combines sport with physiotherapy, which are two passions of mine.

“One of the benefits of my role is it’s quite varied. So, there is that hands-on clinical work, from a medical point of view, but there’s also the governance and the support side of it as well. So it’s multifaceted, which is what I really enjoy.”

Rattenberry thrives on the day-to-day contact with the athletes under his care.

“In Wales, we’re a relatively small country on the population side of things,” he says. “From an athletics point of view, we’re one big family. We’ve got athletes on programme who have been here for five, six, seven years.

 

“And then there are athletes who come on to programme who you’ve seen coming through their development stages before finally coming into programme.

“You get to know people, you get to work with them over a long period of time, and to get to see their highs, you get to share their lows.

“As physios, we are the ones who usually spend quite a bit of time with the athletes. And if they’re going through an injury or a rehabilitation phase, I go through the highs and the lows with them.”

During one of those lows, Rattenberry helped solve the mystery illness which had sidelined marathon runner Dewi Griffiths for months and confounded a series of medical specialists.

Talking to Dai Sport about the illness, which Griffiths feared could end his running career, the Swansea Harrier said: “Adam Rattenberry, the Welsh Athletics physio, had a friend who was a vestibular physio.

“I had seen specialists, but they couldn’t find anything. Adam said it was maybe something wrong along those lines. We went outside the box and I was diagnosed with the balance issue.”

As a physiotherapist, it is inevitable that Rattenberry will be there during some of his athletes’ most challenging times.

Injuries are an occupational hazard for sports people who push their bodies to the limit.

Adam Rattenberry in his days with Cardiff City. Pic: Getty Images.

“It’s never good to have an injury as an athlete,” says Rattenberry, who adds it’s important to keep life as normal as possible during recovery.

“I think one thing we do well is try to link in very closely with the coach and the athlete.

“We come up with a plan B, which sticks to plan A as close as possible.

“When an athlete picks up an injury, we try and keep training as close to normal as possible, whether that’s in the pool, whether it’s on a cross trainer, depending on what their injury limitations are.

“We try and maintain everything as close to normal so the athletes stay in a routine, that their body stays in its routine.

“Then, bringing in the psycho-social side of it as well, we look at how we modify that training within the limitations of the injury to keep them with a group of people or interacting with their coach and minimise the impact of that injury as much as possible.”

If the worst should happen and injury strikes for any of Wales’ athletes during this summer’s busy schedule, they can be safe in the knowledge they will have the nation’s sporting “secret weapon” firmly on their side.

 

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