Vicky Fleetwood

The Stylist front cover changed perceptions, the naked photoshoot was part of a new movement, but a front rower that could play wing at sevens? Now that is something to talk about. Meet Vicky Fleetwood. Game changer.

The Rio Olympics had been the carrot. She already had a job she loved, a career in personal fitness training in a luxury London gym, and she’d have to take a pay cut to take on the new role. But, Vicky had been training for this, since the beginning. Since she started athletics with her dad, since she became a sprinter, a hurdler, then a rugby player. “One thing I always wanted to be,” begins Vicky, “even before I played rugby, when I was doing athletics, was to be a full-time athlete. I was working at the Third Space in Soho as a personal trainer, I loved the gym, I loved the people I worked with, I just thoroughly enjoyed it, but I couldn’t turn down the offer of a contract, even though the money wasn’t fantastic.

“I’d been playing rugby for free up to then, so I was going to be paid for my hobby. It was the year leading into the Olympics, so why would you not try and get into that squad? A single year, and I had no idea how I was going to fare.”

The England sevens’ contract meant training every day. “We were in Monday to Friday, Wednesday was when we had recovery, and then weekends off,” she recalls. “You’d do two to three sessions a day, so you really earnt your weekend as you were shattered by Friday.

“We did a session called Death Games in which you’d do 90 seconds on of hard work, then 30 seconds off, do a number of those back to back. You’d get to the point where you’re absolutely blowing and having to make decisions, which is one of the biggest parts of sevens – when you’re on a field and you’ve got nothing left to give, and there’s 90m between you and the tryline and you’ve got to get there to win a game. That could be in the dying seconds of a game so you’ve been sprinting for fourteen minutes and the buzz is gone, it’s down to who can out-think the opposition.”

Vicky was also a sevens’ rookie. Although playing hooker, she had pace built from her athletics days and Simon Middleton, her fifteens coach with England, had seen the potential. “He knew the skills that I had, and one thing that made me stand out was my pace, because even though I was playing in the front row, I was a hurdler when I was seventeen. 

“I played a tighter game in the front row so you didn’t see it that often but he asked me to go and play in the Euros, I got capped for the sevens’ team, then, a month later, they offered me a contract. I hadn’t even thought I was on their radar before then.”

Given her lack of experience in the abridged game, even though she was one of twenty England players on contract, when the players from Scotland and Wales were thrown into the equation, getting into the British Olympics squad was far from easy. “It becomes difficult when you miss a couple of tournaments and people in your position are on form,” she admits. “It can become quite hard, especially if everyone has gone away and there’s a few of you left at home who are injured or not selected, you’re still training. There were a few times when maybe just five of us were left training alone.” 

As the Olympics drew closer, she had an injury that forced her out of back-to-back tournaments. “That was during the time my mum passed away, so I was really pleased I didn’t go,” she says. “It meant I got to be there with my mum. She had cancer. I’d picked up an injury, and I decided I wasn’t going to be around the girls and train here, I was going to go home. That was one of the best decisions I’ve made. In the grand scheme of things it probably was one of the reasons I didn’t make the Olympics squad, but it was worth it. “Whether I’d have made the Olympics or not, I don’t know,” she admits. “But family should be something you put before everything, it wasn’t like she had the flu. It also wasn’t just being there for my mum, it was for my family, to be there so we could be strong together. There was nothing I could do to help my mum, but I knew that I could help my family, so it’s just about doing what’s right. I always knew I could go back to rugby.”

The illness had taken a grip over a two-year period, but they decided not to tell Vicky at first. “They kept it from me for a while because of the rugby side of things,” explains Vicky. “They wanted me to concentrate on that until it got really bad and there was no coming back. 

“[When they told me] the doctors said it would likely be weeks. At that point, you think, ‘if they’re saying weeks, is that under a month? Are they likely to say a month or two if not?’. “To take that time away from rugby is nothing – although rugby gives you so much, it’s just a sport, it’s just a game, and it was a hobby. 

“Yes, it’s my job now, but it’s still just a game. Most of the sevens girls at the time came to the funeral and supported me through it, the team manager and the coaches were really good, telling me to take the time I needed, to ‘do what I’ve got to do’, and that’s all you need from them, understanding. You just don’t know how you’re going to react.”

And the impact? “I think it’s massively changed me, I don’t take as much shit anymore,” she says. “It put things into perspective, what’s important and what isn’t, and when I am injured, or if I’m not selected, those things are easier to deal with. I have to remind myself, ‘why am I getting so bothered about a game?’. And there’s so many things I can do to improve, I now look at that side of it rather than getting emotional about a situation.

“Luckily when I won the World Cup she was there, but the stuff I’ve done since then – I’ve been to another World Cup, lost in the final, did a sevens World Cup, Commonwealth Games… … she didn’t see that, but I know she would be proud.”

With no rugby background to speak of, Vicky’s first sporting love was athletics. “My parents were never into rugby, I never came from a rugby family,” she says. “I’ve got a twin brother, he played county rugby, he was very sporty. We’d done athletics since age of eleven, that was dad’s love, he was a coach, and we were naturally quite good. 

“We started as sprinters, then went on to do multi-sport events, my brother did decathlon, I did heptathlon – Dad had done decathlon. We liked to think we were all-rounders, and do a bit of everything. Every single weekend we had competitions.

“I started rugby when they the school ran a session to see how many girls were interested – fifty girls turned up. I was in fourteen or fifteen, I didn’t know what a ruck was, I just knew if someone had the ball, I had to get them down to the floor and make that tackle. If I had the ball, then I had to get it over the line.”

She eventually found her way to Lichfield under-18s, then seniors. “I went to university at Leeds Met and still played for Lichfield, Emily Scarratt went to the same uni and we car shared on the way down each week for Thursday training.”

With her professional career taking her to London, Vicky left Lichfield for Saracens, choosing the latter due to the presence of an England hooker rival at Richmond, a club far closer to her base in south east London. 

She’d already made her international debut and played a key role in securing only England’s second Rugby World Cup, starting in the 21-9 win over Canada in Paris. 

As we know, when she returned to rugby, she didn’t make the Olympics, but she got close. “I was in there right up until very last point,” she says. “I’d got up to the last sixteen of the GB team. Sixteen of us went to France as a last hit out, and two of us were dropped when we got back, and I was one of them. We literally just got back from  a tournament in France and we were told in the car park, myself and the other girl. Probably not done in the best way, but…”

Olympics or not, fifteens was always there for Vicky, as she went straight into another full-time contract, and another, and another. She’s one of only a handful of players that have been a full-time rugby player ever since those first contracts were awarded. “My first year was sevens, then it was just fifteens, then it was sevens again with the Commonwealths,” she explains, highlighting how initially the RFU contracted either sevens or fifteens, but never both, to best manage funds. “There was a handful of us, including Emily Scarratt and Sarah McKenna that did the same thing because we just wanted to play rugby and be a full-time athlete so we played wherever we were able to do that.

“Now they want you to choose which you want to play so you won’t continually flit,” continues Vicky. “So now, for the foreseeable future, they’re contracting both at the same time. Whichever your interest is in, there’s the opportunity.”

Not only did Vicky flit between games, but also positions. Having played centre in her junior days, then made her mark as a hooker, she now plays on the flank. “I did one tour before the 2014 World Cup and played the whole time as flanker and I loved it,” she says. “I loved the freedom of getting your hands on the ball, your work rate can be higher because you’re not doing as much in the scrum as well. I was lighter in the scrum so it took a lot of energy out of me.

“My England coaches said they’d like to see me as mainly an openside flanker, but because Marlie [Packer, also a Saracens team-mate] is also there, we play left and right, and do a bit of both, to share the workload. 

“Marlie is a good friend so we don’t want it to be always fighting against each other for a shirt, and actually we can work alongside each other. We’re very different players and, if you combined the two of us, we’d be an unstoppable player.”

Vicky has 30,000 followers on Instagram. To put that into context, her friend and colleague, the record points-scoring Emily Scarratt has 15,000. It’s rare for a forward to outshine a back in the social media stakes, but Vicky has worked hard to apply her two professions – rugby and fitness training – to her feed. “I was pretty late to the party with Instagram,” she says, “but my boyfriend massively encouraged me because I offered the gym stuff on top of being a rugby player.

“Right from the start I wanted it to be a professional-looking account, I didn’t want it to be dogs and random things. You look at some of the girls who haven’t thought about it as much, and it might be random nights out or anything, but I wanted mine to be based around rugby, gym stuff, and then maybe a few holiday pics. 

“I think long and hard about what I post, and how it’s going to be portrayed, what I put out there.”

For the Rugby Journal photoshoot, Vicky climbs ropes, lifts [proper weights], and effectively did what seemed like a full workout. No half measures, but also no painstaking unnatural poses either. “Taking selfies for Instagram is now not something I’d naturally do, so I try and think about how I’m going to do it,” she says. “I’m probably a bit awkward, the more you do it, the more confident you get with doing things like that. I was quite comfortable with your guys.”

It also helped that Vicky was one of the pioneers of women’s rugby to transcend the sport, appearing on the front cover of Stylist with the headline ‘Fearless’, and also appearing in Sport as part of a naked issue. “I was lucky to be on the front of Stylist magazine,” she says, “it was a few years ago, and so many people followed me off the back of that, it was very much, ‘oh wow, women playing rugby’. Then there was the naked photoshoot with Sport – that was the start of the ‘strong is beautiful’ movement. 

“It was when we started seeing and talking about women being strong, lifting weights in the gym, and now you see it everywhere – all women now want to lift weights, or at least be toned and have muscles. You see it coming in to play with the brands and the activewear. 

“Back in the day everybody just wanted to be skinny, whereas now a lot more people are aware of being healthy, getting themselves to the gym. That’s probably why my profile is what it is, because I like to do that side of things: gym, fitness, and rugby.”

Does the higher profile attract the trolls? “Now there’s so much about body positivity and being strong that there isn’t any negativity, you get a lot of positive comments: ‘looking ripped’. Very rarely now is it anything bad. 

“In the past, you’d get people having negative views on women playing rugby, but women’s rugby has evolved, whereas so many people – even five years ago – were, ‘so you play rugby? Full contact?’ They couldn’t fathom it, they couldn’t get why you’d wanted to play. 

“Now people are intrigued about what you get up to, how you train in the gym, how you get to be strong. People ask how they get this physique, but I’ve done this for twelve or thirteen years now, this isn’t just lifting for a few weeks. I’ve trained for a long period of time to be the shape I’m in.

“I’m a lot prouder  of my body than I used to be because I know full well I’ve worked hard.”

The game is also changing shape. Saracens offered the first contracts in the club game, albeit not vast sums, and the Tyrell Premier 15s has started the tender process again, with only six of the ten existing sides guaranteed to stay in the English top flight. 

Controversially, Richmond, one of the stalwarts and most successful sides in the history of the elite women’s game, are among those that have been told they must re-tender for a place. Lichfield were the biggest club to miss out when the last franchises were awarded and as a former player, Vicky knows how much it hurt them. “I was gutted for Lichfield,” she says. “I just thought, considering the amount of players that have gone on to play rugby for England from Lichfield, for them to be scrapped…  … that was the biggest, hardest thing to take. 

“Clearly there were decent coaches, and a decent set-up because Lichfield were top three in the Premiership for years. That was hard to take. Just because they didn’t have the right bid, the facilities that they wanted, they got shunted.”

Whoever makes it to the TP15s will be joining a league that is progressing. “It’s gone from tens of fans – people’s parents – to 100s, it’s still not exactly great numbers,” she admits. “We’re getting good numbers to England games though, every single game we play we get fantastic crowds, and at the smaller grounds we’re getting sell-outs, but we need to get more watching those club games week-in, week-out.

“I think you’ve got to target a certain audience,” continues Vicky. “Perhaps school kids because they’re going to play on Sunday but they’re potentially free on Saturday, and they might not want to pay the rates for a Premiership game.

“Or just focus on girls, because if you’re looking for a girl to aspire to want to play rugby, surely it’s better for them to be watching women’s rugby rather than watching boys run around the pitch.”

At least the product, reckons Vicky, is there waiting for them. “The standard has gone through the roof,” she says. “I’ve played in TP15s game that have been harder than internationals, and that’s the level of English rugby for the women, which is why it attracts players. We’ve got Italians, Irish girls, Canadians, all coming across to play in our Premiership, because of the standard.”

And it could be better too. “In my mind, you’ve got a certain amount of full-time players contracted to England, but is there no way Sarries or the other clubs could pay – again pocket money – to a number of girls to come in for certain sessions so that you can have more meaningful training sessions with more players during the day ? In my mind, that’s the only way to build. Then, over a number of years, you’ve got a squad of full-time players at each of the clubs.”

Achieve that, and maybe Vicky can then achieve her ultimate goal, one that can even top her World Cup win. “When we won the World Cup it was absolutely amazing, the best feeling ever,” she says, “but I’d love to do it against New Zealand. 

“So many times England have fallen short to New Zealand and, really annoyingly we beat New Zealand in New Zealand in the summer tour before the World Cup, which is the hardest thing to do. That win in Rotorua, when the Lions tour was on and there were so many Lions fans watching, is probably my second favourite memory in rugby after the World Cup. We knew we could beat them.

“Yeah, the icing on the cake is the first World Cup win, but the cherry on the top would definitely be a World Cup final win against New Zealand.”

Words by: Alex Mead

Pictures by: Nicky Emmerson

This extract was taken from issue 9 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.