Jaimie
Fuller

I didn't build a career in sport. I built a habit of taking uncomfortable positions and asking the uncomfortable questions of the people in charge, realised people would pay me for it, and never looked back.

I ran SKINS, the compression apparel brand, from 2004 to 2019 — fifteen years of telling elite athletes to put on tight clothes and trust me, which, somehow, worked. The whole business was built on a bet that recovery mattered as much as performance, back when most of the industry thought “recovery” meant a beer and a nap. These days I'm Chair and co-founder of eo, where actual scientists and engineers do the hard part, and I mostly just ask annoying questions until the products get better.

The activism side has no such tidy elevator pitch. I've spent years picking fights with people who run sport like it's their personal fiefdom — cheats, federations protecting themselves instead of the athletes they're meant to serve, and the corruption and unacceptable practices that keep getting dressed up as “tradition.” When we created the Australian version of the Rainbow Round of Sport in 2016, head office backed it without blinking — turns out occasionally doing the right thing is good for business too.

I get invited to speak about all this around the world, which I can only assume means conference organisers enjoy a small amount of chaos with their keynote.