Gloucester Wing star Ollie Thorley on why being big and fast too early in life stunted his skills, on the challenges of overcoming a stammer at Cheltenham College and plotting a second career.
Watch the full interview with Ollie Thorley below:
Ollie Thorley is a Gloucester legend. He made his debut at 17, the youngest player to do so in the pro era, in 2013, and has been a regular supplier of tries and assists ever since and his exploits have seen him picked by England.
But he told Sport and Life that being fast and strong early in boyhood actually stunted his rugby development – because his raw physicality made it so easy to score tries he didn’t have to learn the fundamental skills.
“I was always the biggest, quickest player on the pitch from the age of six, seven, all the way through. But I think, for me, I did definitely suffer as a result of that to some degree. I don’t think my skillset was where it needed to be earlier on in my career because I’d never needed to have that skillset,” Thorley recalled.
Sport is rife with tales of the waif who became a legend. Particularly, in football, diminutive boys like George Best and Lionel Messi compensated for their lack of bulk by developing genius-level finesse.
And Thorley found there wasn’t an incentive to develop great handling and passing skills when you can just outrun and outmuscle opponents.
“I’m not trying to be cocky. I would always be the person who would score the most tries because I was either quicker than someone or more powerful than someone.
“Certainly from a skill-set perspective, it’s well documented that you sometimes learn and develop your skills more when you’re under more pressure.”
But how does youth rugby resolve the size and development tension? It’s common for a boy of 12 to be two years ahead of his age physically, effectively the size of a 14 year-old.
Another 12 year-old boy could be two years behind his age though – the size and strength of an average 10 year-old. These boys could be opponents in an unfair showdown.
Thorley believes using scales rather than birth certificates to group players is a way to avoid such mismatches.
“In New Zealand it’s done by weight category. And I think that makes so much sense from health and safety perspective and also from a player development perspective. In New Zealand you rarely get guys who don’t have good skillsets.”
The biggest boys don’t always become the biggest men. So players who excel in junior ranks don’t always measure up when it comes to selecting the senior side. And Thorley remembers coaches being keen to find out his physical lineage on his mother’s side.
“I remember John Fletcher and Peter Walton who ran the England under-18 programme. They were legendary coaches who brought through all these players and I remember they would look at the size of mothers, in particular.
“That was always a question. ‘How tall is your mum?’”
Thorley may have been physically gifted and loved his school days at Cheltenham College. But he says he wasn’t wholly comfortable with the attention his athletic prowess brought. He was Deputy Head Boy, but the public-speaking involved elevated his self-consciousness.
“When I was younger, I had a bit of a stammer as well. So public speaking was like doubly, doubly daunting, But it’s something that I’ve had to work on quite a lot and actually it’s been a really rewarding process working on it.
Perhaps utilising the same discipline he’s deployed to hone his rugby skills and game IQ, Thorley has done more than work on it. Speaking to him, you’d never guess he’d ever had a stammer.
“I have done speech therapy over the years, and actually did a programme with an institution called City Lit with a friend of mine, an osteopath called James Davies. He and I did this programme and it helps you to understand your stammer a bit better and kind of accept certain elements of it.
“A classic thing that I would do is word replace. So if I wanted to say something and I knew there was a word I was going to struggle with I would just flip it out for a synonym or say it in a way that would mean that I wouldn’t have to say that word.”
Clearly the stammer-swerving strategies have worked, but Thorley says also reaching a state of acceptance reduced the prominence of the problem.
“You develop all these strategies and stuff, but actually it’s about learning to kind of live with it a bit better and actually since I’ve done that I don’t really even think of myself as someone with a stammer anymore.”
At 29, Thorley is in his rugby prime. But he’s aware a sportsman’s career is a glorious but fast-lived affair and he has been preparing for his post-playing days. He’s studying for a degree in Geography and Environmental Science and is intrigued by the financial sector.
“If I could try and couple the environmental science and finance together, that would be amazing. But, yes it’s still a work in progress.”
Ollie Thorley may be a genetically-gifted athlete. But there has clearly been a huge amount of work and effort behind his progress and this will surely stand him in good stead to excel in the next chapter when it arrives.
In the meantime, you’ll find him running down the wing at Kingsholm.
