Tom Solesbury

Tom Solesbury is General Counsel of UK Athletics and a double Olympian, having represented Team GB in rowing at the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games. 

1. Please can you summarise your current role? 

I am General Counsel for UK Athletics, which means I am responsible for the legal function for one of the biggest Olympic national governing bodies. My role is quite broad and varied. I am responsible for providing day-to-day legal advice across the business, as well as disciplinary investigations and cases, commercial contracts, data protection compliance, and safeguarding. I also discharge the function of Company Secretary. 
 
2. When did your interest in sports law begin? 

My interest in sports law started as soon as I wanted to become a lawyer. When I was doing my A-levels, I decided I wanted to go and do a Law degree, and I was always mad keen on sport, so you put the two together and it makes sense. I didn’t go to a firm that did a lot of sports law when I trained, so it wasn’t until after I spent some time rowing and then got back into my legal career that I met my former business partner, Mark Gay, who has been a sports lawyer for a long time. We met together on a review for UK Sport into British Judo and we worked well together on that and really enjoyed it. After that, we set up Solesbury Gay, which specialised in sports law. It was a bit of a slow transition getting to be a sports lawyer, but with my background and love of sport it’s something I wanted to do for a long time. 

3. How do you think being a former GB rower has influenced your current career? 

I think probably in two main ways: 

 1. The kind of dedication and amount you have to put in to get to the top level of rowing is just generally helpful in any career because you’ve got that dedication to whatever you’re doing. 
 
 2. It gave me a really good insight from an athlete’s perspective into the sporting landscape in the UK. For example, going through that system and living first-hand the selection policies and appeals, and going through the UK sport system and how an athlete is given a grant through UK Sport and the contracts the athlete has to sign up to. It actually gave me a perspective that I think a lot of lawyers don’t have on the Olympic and Paralympic funding system and the way it’s all set up, so that’s actually been really helpful.   

4. How did you find your role at Solesbury Gay? 
 
It was fantastic. Going through the process of setting up my own law firm and being part of it grow was a great experience. We worked for loads of top clients across sport, including football, F1 and Olympic and Paralympic sports. Now I am really glad that as I have moved on to UK Athletics, Mark [Gay] is continuing the practice on at Payne Hicks Beech. 

5. Does your current role require different skills? 

My new role is quite different in that I am dealing with only one client and I have a lot more matters! Speaking to other in-house lawyers, it seems that in-house work is often very fast-paced and that is certainly my experience. 
 
6. What are the most interesting cases that you have worked on? 
 
I’ve been very fortunate to do a lot of very interesting cases. At Solesbury Gay, we did a lot of work for the English Football League, prosecuting Financial Fair Play cases, and that work was very interesting because it’s been very topical and very newsworthy. I have also worked on a lot of cases where there’s been a safeguarding or welfare element involving sexual abuse or bullying. Whilst I probably don’t enjoy those cases so much because of the suffering the victims will have endured, it is important work and I am hopefully doing my very small part to help change the sporting landscape in relation to the minority of people who want to abuse others. 

7. What is your proudest legal achievement to date? 
 
It’s funny, I’m not really one to look back and reflect normally. I normally just finish a case or cases and kind of move on to the next one without really looking back. I think that is something that has come from my sporting career – there is no time to look back at what you are proud of because you have to prepare for the next race. It is good to learn lessons from past performances but that is probably as far as I went. As you are pressing me [!] I would probably say my proudest achievement is setting up my firm which grew into a practice with some high-profile clients and did some amazing work.  

8. What are some of the key legal developments in sport at the moment? 

I think two of the key areas are around safeguarding and welfare of young adults in sport. I think the areas have developed so much in the last ten years and they still are. I think more and more cases of abuse are being reported and certainly within UK Athletics there’s a strong feeling that people, coaches, officials, whoever it is, who abuse children or young people have no part in sport. Panels seem to be taking a tough stance, including banning people from the sport for life and I’m not sure that’s a position we’d have been in ten years ago. To me, and certainly within my world and the work I’m doing, that’s been the key change and something I really want to be a part of and make sure that that continues and those kind of people who want to behave in that way are not welcome in sport. 
 
9. What are the rewards and challenges of being a sports lawyer?
 
I think for me the main reward is, for someone who loves sport, to be able to work in that industry is fantastic, I wouldn’t change it for the world. 

One of the main challenges is the passion involved in sport. Disputes are often hard-fought because they mean so much to everyone involved. That is not something I would want to change – it is one of the things that makes the sector so unique, but it does lead to decision-making that you may not see in other sectors.  

10. What is next for you in your career? Where do you think you might be in ten years’ time? 

I probably don’t think that far into the future and think what I might like to do. I would like to do work that interests me and makes a difference. As long as there are interesting cases to do and problems to solve, I hope I’m still doing those somewhere within sport. At some point I would like to experience working within an international federation.  
 
11. Do you think you might ever go back into rowing at some point, perhaps as a coach?
 
Potentially. I love rowing, it’s a brilliant sport. I’d love to still be doing it but I’ve injured my shoulder so I can’t row again, which is a shame. My difficulty with coaching is that it takes up so much time and I don’t really have the time with work and my daughter only being four. But, maybe one day I will absolutely try and give something back with rowing coaching. 
 
12. What advice would you give to aspiring sports lawyers? 

I would be realistic because there are not many lawyers who are fortunate enough to just do sports law. So, I’d say don’t be completely focused on that. Sure, have it as a goal, but also make sure you get a good grounding in the law, because that’s what’s going to stand you in good stead long term in contract law, in property law, in corporate law. Make sure you cover all the bases and don’t be just completely obsessed with sports law, and I think if you can find your way into sports law then all those things are going to stand you in good stead. 
 
13. Please can you describe a typical day in your life? 

I get woken up at 6:30 by my daughter who comes into my bedroom. At the moment, I tend to be at my desk at 7:00, since I’m mainly working at home and I tend to do my best work early in the morning! The typical kind of stuff I’m doing is preparing charges in cases, investigating disciplinary matters, drafting policies and generally advising on anything that comes up during the day. I’m still very much into training (cycling now) so I try to fit in a quick blast on the Wattbike if I can! 

14. How did COVID-19 impact your work? Is it still having an impact now? Do you think it will continue to impact your work in the future?

There have been two main impacts really, in that we had to work from home and so the work actually carried on but cases were just done by Zoom or Teams. Online hearings have taken a bit of getting used to but on the whole they have been great in terms of flexibility of saving money on venues and travel. 
 
The other knock-on effect is that I work from home more. I no longer spend 2-3 hours travelling every day, which has generally been positive. Now I get that extra time to either do more work or to spend some time with my family, so to me there’s some real positives in terms of the working day that have come out of that. So on the whole, I think it has given me a wake-up call on how things could be done in terms of better home-working and work-life balance.