Sport Takes Her Places: From the field of play to leading teams towards success
At the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games, the success of several teams was shaped by women whose journeys began on the field of play. From Chefs de Mission Eve Muirhead (GBR) and Jennifer Heil (CAN) to coaches Elfje Willemsen (BEL) and Helene Jørgensen (NOR), each turned the lessons of their sporting paths into the guidance and support their athletes needed most.
Key facts
- The Milano Cortina 2026 Games were the most gender-balanced in Olympic Winter Games history, with women accounting for 47 per cent of all athletes.
- A gender gap still exists in the athletes' entourage, with the number of women holding roles such as Chef de Mission, Technical Official and coach remaining low. At Beijing 2022, only 10 per cent of coaches were women.
- The IOC is working to increase the number of female coaches and team leaders through dedicated programmes such as the WISH pathway. At Milano Cortina 2026, nine WISH graduates were involved in key roles ranging from coaching and team leadership to Games operations, with one also competing as an athlete.
Muirhead, Heil, Willemsen and Jørgensen show how sport can take female athletes far beyond competition, equipping them with the confidence, resilience and skills needed for leadership roles. All of them have drawn on their personal experiences to guide the next generation of Olympians and encourage other women to forge their own paths.
Jennifer Heil: The mindset behind a Chef de Mission
During her time competing in moguls, Jennifer Heil became familiar with pushing limits, navigating setbacks and getting back up again.
The mental resilience she developed on the slopes – which helped her win Olympic gold at Turin 2006 and silver at Vancouver 2010 – has shaped her move into leadership. Today, whether it is founding her own women's health technology business or serving as Canada's Chef de Mission at Milano Cortina 2026, she continues to approach things with the same mindset.
"Sport gave me mental and emotional capacity," Heil said. "I did a lot of work in sports psychology – accessing my mind, heart and body to be ready. I bring many of the same elements that led to peak performance into my everyday experiences.”
"Resilience isn't something we're born with – it's something we train. In mogul skiing, you literally have massive crashes. Learning how to get back up is the real world.”
Eve Muirhead: Using Olympic experience to guide athletes
For Eve Muirhead, who oversaw Team GB's most successful Olympic Winter Games yet, the experience she gained as a four-time Olympian and curling gold medallist proved invaluable in her Chef de Mission role at Milano Cortina 2026.
Muirhead's Olympic journey was marked by its own highs and lows – from her Olympic debut at Vancouver 2010, to bronze at Sochi 2014, a fourth-place finish at PyeongChang 2018, and finally gold at Beijing 2022. This shaped the way she supported athletes competing on the Olympic stage.
"My time as an athlete definitely helped me in this role,” Muirhead said. “Whether it was delivering under pressure, leadership, the experience of a variety of different Games or knowing what it is the athletes want and need."
"I've probably gone through a lot more hard times than great times within sport,” she added. “It's about how you deal with those moments and how you come back from failure.”
"Having gone through it myself, I'm very conscious of making sure we have that support around the athletes as well."
Elfje Willemsen and Helene Jørgensen: Coaching with confidence
For many women in high-performance sport, the confidence built through years of competing becomes one of their greatest assets for their work as coaches.
Elfje Willemsen competed in bobsleigh at three Olympic Winter Games before moving into coaching following PyeongChang 2018. The self-belief and resilience she developed as an athlete helped her guide the Canadian team to two bobsleigh bronze medals at Beijing 2022. At Milano Cortina 2026, Willemsen continued her coaching journey with the Swiss bobsleigh team.
"I'm not a super confident person," she said. "But whenever I have to walk into a room with a lot of people, I tell myself I've competed at the Olympics, I'm a coach at the Olympics and I can go down an icy track at 140km/h. If I can do that, I can do anything."
Willemsen was one of nine graduates from the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Women in Sport High-Performance (WISH) programme who were present at Milano Cortina 2026. Designed to tackle the under-representation of women in elite coaching, the four-year mentorship and training initiative equips female coaches with the skills needed to take on roles at the highest level of their sport. To date, 120 coaches from 59 countries and 22 sports have graduated from the WISH programme.
Another WISH graduate at Milano Cortina 2026 was Helene Jørgensen, a coach with Canada's biathlon team who previously competed in the sport at national level in Norway. For her, the programme offered something rare: a room full of women navigating similar challenges in coaching.
"The WISH programme was a really unique experience because it was the first time I had seen that many high-performance female coaches gathered in one room," Jørgensen said. "That in itself was very inspiring.”
"There was power in the numbers, in seeing you're not the only one and in sharing experiences – hearing how others approach their jobs, what they do and how they try to learn and improve.
"For me, it was a lot about teaching self-awareness as a coach and recognising your strengths and what you bring to a team, but also seeing how you can continue to develop as a leader."
Sport takes her places
The IOC is celebrating the transformative power of sport throughout the month of March, highlighting its role in the journeys of women who were competing, coaching or in leadership roles at Milano Cortina 2026.
Follow the conversation during the month and discover more inspiring stories on the Olympic platforms.