Daniel Rees highlights three individuals who are using their experiences and initiative to tackle some of athletics major issues head on

Athletics embodies a form of human evolution the quest to run faster, throw further and jump higher.

But to those deeply rooted in the sport, much of its meaning is derived from far more than simply winning. There is an emerging openness among athletes who are sharing exactly what it is that makes track and field important to them and the answer is not always medals and international vests.

Inclusivity, community and enjoyment are also emerging as common reasons for committing years of their lives to the sport and some athletes have even taken it upon themselves to make their mark in a different way.

Joe Fuggle, Ethan Akanni, and Lewis Church have all stepped outside of the track and field bubble as they try to understand how they can make it more meaningful for themselves and for others.

For Fuggle, a mindset of searing intensity brought him success as a junior 400m hurdler in the shape of international vests and national titles. But that same approach eventually cost him his career.

Ultimately he left the sport the hard way, having grown to resent what had once been his passion.

An element of his determination still burns brightly, though, and he has channelled his experience of athlete burnout into something much more positive in the form of theathleteplace, an online athlete wellbeing hub.

It began as what he describes as a glorified blog, where athletes could share some of the hardships they had been enduring.

It all started off the back of my own experiences of struggling with mental health, struggling with athlete burnout and not having that place to go for guidance from people who really understood what I was going through, Fuggle says. I thought, if there wasnt something out there like this already, then Id create it myself.

Fuggle admits he hit rock bottom when he left the sport in 2020, though worse was to come when his former coach of several years was given a life ban from athletics for breaching safeguarding rules.

There are so many things that really impact athletes and really impact your life outside sport, he adds. Not many sportspeople were talking about how they felt. They werent talking about the realities of being an athlete and the ways you could get help and get support.

The more people who can talk about these things, show vulnerability and show theyre humans first and not just robots thats when this positive change is really going to make a difference.

A look at theathleteplace website shows a huge wealth of resource for both athletes and parents to help make the journey of an athletics career easier.

Theres now an opportunity to keep pushing something positive, Fuggle says. A happy athlete is a successful athlete. If we can have enough role models showcasing that, the next generation its going to become more normalised thats how we make a real culture shift in sport.

Ethan Akanni came across different challenges during the early stages of his career, but, like Fuggle, felt there needed to be a place in the sport where he felt understood.

Akanni came out as gay to school friends around the same time when he started athletics, but it took years for him to feel comfortable being himself in his chosen sport.

Homophobia was not necessarily the problem Akanni says athletics is much more progressive than other sports in that respect but there was still something missing.

Working alongside sprint hurdles coach Andy Paul, he set up the Athletics Pride Network in 2019. Openness, Akanni says, was the key having a place where athletes could talk without fear of discrimination.

We dont necessarily want to change conversations, but we want to start the conversation, he adds. If we can share experiences of LGTBQ+ athletes, share their stories and use our knowledge and experiences, we can help educate others as well.

I think its starting to become a lot more evident to people that you need to attack these situations early and not let them manifest and get worse.

If I had had the Athletics Pride Network [10 years ago], it would have made me feel so much more comfortable to talk about it. It would have normalised the conversation around being LGBTQ+ a bit more. It would have allowed me to be myself a lot more quickly.

Even when it comes to nurturing the youngest generation of athletes, there also seems to be a desire to try doing things differently.

Lewis Church, an international multi-eventer, felt an urge to get involved in coaching more heavily when he saw the length of the waiting list for youngsters wanting to join his local athletics club in Tonbridge, which had more than trebled to 135 within the space of a year.

In response, he set up a new athletics club in the form of West Kent AC with the aim of easing the burden.

I sent a proposal to clubs in Tonbridge and Medway to say I was thinking of starting a new athletics club
as a relief for waiting lists, says Church, who coaches alongside his clubmate and fellow international decathlete Harry Kendall. The clubs just trusted me; the idea was to act as a feeder for other athletics clubs.

When they get to the age when they can join an athletics club as an under-13, athletes will already have a knowledge of the etiquette theyve already got a knowledge of all the events and its much easier for them to get straight into it.

It is a huge positive to be drawn from the challenges facing athletics that there are people actively determined to tackle them head-on and in innovative ways. Fuggle, Akanni and Church have all shown a drive to move things forward and that, ultimately, is the sports real evolution.