Abigail Irozuru

Abigail Irozuru's official speaking topics are listed below: 

One More Rep: Bouncing Back from Setback to Success

In 2019, after multiple surgeries and a couple of years out of the sport, Abigail made the final at the European Indoor Championships, the only British woman to do so, and finished 7th. Not bad for someone who'd been out of competition for the previous two years. That season she jumped a personal best, her first since 2012, seven years in the making, became National Champion, and qualified for the Tokyo Olympic standard. None of it happened because the setbacks stopped; it happened because she kept finding one more rep, with no guarantee of the end result. 

This talk uses that season, and the decade either side of it, to give audiences a practical framework for bouncing back: acceptance of where you actually are, balance instead of burnout, the crew around you, and the discipline that holds when motivation doesn't show up. Abigail speaks candidly about fighting for support as the country's number one female long jumper at an age the system had already written off, and about what it means to keep stepping into governance and leadership rooms where she's still too often the only Black woman there, and working to change that. 

Who this talk is for: corporate away days and conferences, leadership teams navigating a difficult period, schools and sixth forms around exam season, and any audience for whom "resilience" has started to sound like a buzzword rather than something real.

Career Leaps: Mastering Change with an Olympic Mindset

Athletes move through more forced transitions than almost anyone: junior to senior, injury to comeback, competition to retirement, and eventually athlete to whatever comes next. Abigail has been through all of them, most recently the jump from twenty years as a professional athlete into partnerships, governance and consultancy, whilst finishing an MBA and navigating the uncertainty of retirement, all at the same time. 

There's no perfect straight line to mastering change. This talk draws an analogy between the "return to play" process athletes use to rebuild after injury, physical, then technical, then competitive, and the messy middle everyone faces during change at work: redundancy, restructuring, a new role, a step up they didn't feel ready for. It's about navigating that messy middle with a smile and the right people around you, so you come out the other side with clarity, purpose, faith and hope for what's next, knowing success isn't defined by the destination but by how you journey through it. 

Who this talk is for: new recruits and graduate schemes, teams going through restructuring or change management, emerging leaders stepping into bigger roles, and university or college audiences facing their own next leap.

The Long Game: Sustained Success at the Highest Level

Elite sport will teach you how to chase a number, or a distance. There's so much more to life than that. When Abigail came back to the sport in 2018 after a couple of years away, she came back differently: less rushed between competitions, more selective about where and how she trained, and managing her programme around a more mature body and her own cycle rather than against them. She stopped taking the earliest flight to a competition because her sleep mattered more, and started staying an extra day or two in whatever city she was in: a walk through a park, a Sunday church service, actually seeing the place rather than just the hotel, the track and the airport in between. 

That 2018 to 2022 cycle turned out to be the most successful of her entire career. She was the country's number one long jumper, and made every major final there was to make: the Olympic Games, the European Championships, the World Championships and the Commonwealth Games. The injuries didn't disappear, but they stopped derailing her the way they once had, because for the first time she was building her season around what her body actually needed rather than what she assumed success was supposed to look like. Slowing down didn’t hinder her results; it was part of what made better possible. 

This talk combines two ideas she's worked with for years, one built around peak performance and one around holistic wellness, into a single talk about what success actually costs, and what it doesn't have to. She talks about the discipline that got her to a Tokyo start line, and just as openly about the choices that made it sustainable: the sleep she protected, the pace she set for herself, and what it meant to actually enjoy the process rather than just survive it. 

Who this talk is for: corporate wellbeing days, sales and performance-driven teams who run hot, and any audience ready to hear that burnout isn't proof of commitment.

• 2026 - Retired from international track and field after 17 years
• 2025 - Regional President of the Professional Speaking Association for the North West region
• 2025 - Founded the Entrepreneurship and Sports Industry Club in partnership with the Masood Entrepreneurship Centre
• 2024 - Board Trustee for the Greater Manchester Moving charity
• 2022 - Reached the women's long jump final at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, placing 12th overall
• 2021 - Hosts the 'Define Your Success' podcast 
• 2021 - Reached the women's long jump final at her debut Olympic Games in Tokyo, finishing in 11th place
• 2020 - Won the gold medal in the long jump at the British Indoor Athletics Championships 
• 2019 - Won her first senior British Outdoor Championships title
• 2019 - Finished 7th at the World Athletics Championships in Doha with a personal best leap of 6.86 metres
• 2017 - Established Manchester Tutors, to provide educational consultancy and mentorship
• 2012 - Won a gold medal at the Bratislava Indoor Grand Prix
• 2008 - Won the gold medal in the long jump at the Commonwealth Youth Games in Pune, India
• 2006 - Won individual silver medals at the British Schools Track and Field Championships
• 2006 - Won individual silver medals at the English Schools Track and Field Championships