In celebration of the 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Paris, GLAMOUR has launched Change The Record, a series dedicated to the women of Team GB, who are flipping the narrative on what it means to be an elite female athlete – from competing on their periods, balancing training with pregnancy and motherhood, navigating body image pressures, and yes, chasing world records.
Here, we chat with Olympic shooter Amber Rutter – who returns to the Olympics just three months after giving birth to her son – about training as a first-time mum, shifting her perspective after disappointment at Tokyo 2020 and the importance of speaking up about mental health…
Skeet shooter Amber Rutter nearly quit her sport in 2021 after a shock-positive COVID test ruled her out of the Tokyo Olympics. “The only reason I continued was to pay my bills,” she says. I needed the sponsorship and the money to be able to basically live and carry on. For a year after that, I was literally turning up to competitions for no other reason. I was in such a bad place.”
But today, as she prepares to compete again at Paris 2024, she has a new mindset – after welcoming her baby son, Tommy, just three months ago.
“Now, what I think about is the story I want to tell him when he's older. I want him to know that it was really, really difficult, but his mum took an opportunity to put herself first – I was a mum and a sports person. I went out there, and I did my very best for him. And just showing him that, you know what? Your life doesn't have to stop. You can make both things work. But for me, being his mum will always be the priority over everything.
“Since having Tommy, I've just realised that there's so much more to life than our sport—even though it's such a big part of me and requires a huge amount of sacrifice. But when I come home from a bad day's training and see my baby smiling and chuckling, it puts it all into perspective.”
Amber shares that she let “fate take hold” when she began trying for a baby with her husband James, knowing the Olympics were getting closer and closer. “It was something we really wanted – when we were trying, I was counting down the months of how close we could really get until I had to choose between becoming a mum or putting that on hold and going to the Olympics,” she says.
But in the end, Tommy arrived in May 2024. “I always felt that if I could give myself a good few months, I believed I could get back into training,” she says. “I always believed I can give it a really, really good shot – and I can do everything. And that's exactly what I did.”
Incredibly, that meant doing the majority of her Olympic training during her pregnancy, before picking it back up again a month after Tommy was born. “I knew that I wanted to take some time off after the birth, for recovery for myself and to bond with my baby. So I did a lot of my training up until February, when I was about 30 weeks,” she says.
In fact, such a thing was fairly unprecedented within her sport – there was no research around the safety of skeet shooting while pregnant, Amber says – but training intuitively, with the support of the sport's governing body, British Shooting, was the approach.
“Generally, we went with how my partner and I felt – and the advice I was receiving from the British Shooting. We sort of had to make our own guidelines in some ways, but I felt really, really good training through the winter. So I felt like I just had to pick up where we left off after having Tommy – and that's exactly what we've done."
Encouragingly, Amber says her experience as a pregnant women in sport was overwhelmingly positive – from medical advice to emotional support. She shares that UK Sport has set up a WhatsApp group for athletes that are new mums – “the baby pictures are adorable!” – and has offered her flexibility when it comes to travelling to the Olympics, in case she felt she needed to bring Tommy with her.
“I feel really proud to be part of such a small but amazing community of women”
Ultimately, she has decided not to take Tommy to the Games. “I know they'll all be watching at home and cheering me on, and we'll have a big celebration when I get home,” she says. “It's instant mum mode when he's around – if he cries, I can't hear anything else. I need to be focused.”
Amber is looking forward to taking a longer maternity leave with Tommy after the Olympics, but for now, she's proud to be part of a circle of athletes taking on motherhood and high-performance sport. “I feel really proud to be part of such a small but an amazing community of women that are doing both – and haven't let that stop them doing the sport they love,” she says.
“Being a mum can be tough – especially while training for the Olympics. It's not for the fainthearted, but knowing that there are other women out there that have done the exact same thing and been really, really successful is so inspiring.”
Amber is warm and positive – her face lights up whenever she speaks about her son or her sport – but I have to ask if she ever wondered if her second attempt at an Olympic medal might not be possible, so soon after giving birth. "A hundred percent! It's very easy to think from the outside, 'well, she's got her sh*t together'. She made it all work. But even now on a daily basis, I still worry. Have I taken on too much? Am I being a good mum?
"When I have to drop Tommy off to my mum's or grandparents and I'm leaving him, I have that guilt. All I want to do is just give him everything. I just want to give him my undivided attention, but I know that I have to do this for me. He won't remember these times – but one day he will know that his mum pushed through and did something for herself and set the example. She went to the Olympics… and hopefully, won a gold medal.
“That's the story he will be telling one day. Not the times over the last couple of months when I've had to leave him to go to a training session. I hope that he can one day see the sacrifices that I had to make in order to have a go at that dream.”
The Olympic canoeist bravely shares her experiences with depression and self harm.
Amber credits a lot of her mental strength to her psychologist, Paul Hughes, who she has been working with since before the Tokyo Olympics – but she shares that being open about mental health was previously a taboo within her sport. "When I was about 18, I started to explore the idea of working with a psychologist and how that might help me. This has always stuck with me – someone directly told me: 'if you need a psychologist, you're a failed shooter'.
“I put it off for a long time after that. I was a young person and I guess I just thought that was the truth for a while. But eventually I thought, I want to gain as much information as possible – and honestly, my scores have stabilised and my performances have rocketed since working with him. It's something that I feel so passionate about and people shouldn't be ashamed of it.
“I went to counselling every week after Tokyo because I was in such a bad place and I just needed someone outside of my family to listen to me and to give me some perspective.”
Amber, who has been skeet shooting with her granddad since she was just 10 years-old, heads to Paris as one of Team GB's gold medal hopefuls, in perhaps one of the lesser-known events at the Olympic Games ("people think I shoot real pigeons – I'm a vegetarian! I've never shot an animal in my life!"). Her sport is one of precision and discipline – and extremely tight safety protocols, of course – and though traditionally male-dominated, she's proud to be a female ambassador.
“I realised very early on that there wasn't very many women doing it,” she says. "Men in tweed, that's the stereotype – but I'm a city girl. I did used to stand out at the range when I was younger, because I had a pink gun and sparkly purple ear defenders! You can have this real girly side, but it doesn't define who you are in your sport. And just because it's been done a certain way, it doesn't mean that you have to follow the stereotype.
“I've really noticed that there's been a lot more young girls joining the sport recently. Sometimes girls come up to me at the local shooting range and tell me that they saw me compete, and it made them want to have a go. It just means the world to me that I can encourage young girls getting into our sport – or any sport – that they can give anything a try.”
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Amber Rutter is an ambassador for Clays, London's virtual clay shooting bars. Find out more here.
