Team GB hopeful Kerenza Bryson is army reserve officer and A&E medic dreaming of Olympics

Kerenza Bryson’s love of ‘chaos’ led to her becoming a junior doctor, army officer AND Olympic athlete.

The 25-year-old hopes to represent Team GB at Paris 2024 in the sport of modern pentathlon, which combines swimming, fencing, horse riding, shooting and running. As if that wasn’t enough to juggle, Bryson is preparing for life in A&E having just qualified as a medic and is a reserve officer in the Royal Logistics Corp.

“I’m a pretty motivated, resilient person and I’ve known since I was a kid that my goal was to be an Olympian,” says Bryson. “This lifestyle of fitting stuff around goes back a long way, to when I first started sport really.

“The skill is mastering how to take off hats and put other hats on within minutes. I think I’ve got quite good with my three hats of medicine, army and sport, of finishing my day of hospital placement, taking off that hat and saying ‘right I”m in sport head now’ and completely going into that mindset. I’m quite good at switching between them.”

Bryson’s dad is a scuba diving doctor and her mum a nurse, meaning a life in medicine was always on the cards. While she is wary of burnout, the Plymouth native has decided she is ‘drawn to the chaos’ and her future lies on the NHS front line.

“It's a really awesome mix of controlled chaos and challenging thinking on your feet,” she says. “It is fast-paced and chaotic but it's one of the worst specialities for burnout. The emergency doctors I've spoken to are always run off their feet and exhausted, it’s so trauma-based, they say it's good for 10 years but then after that you want to do something different, so we'll see.”

2023 showed just how good Bryson is at keeping all the plates spinning. In the middle of an intense final year of her medical degree at the University of Plymouth, she won gold in modern pentathlon’s World Cup and qualified Team GB for Paris with a bronze medal at the World Championships. During that period of time, Bryson lived out of her car with her sports kit in the boot and a sleeping bag on the back seat.

“My hope in the end is that if I go to the Olympics and win a medal then it would have all been worth it,” she said.

“I’m someone who is quite good at dealing with stress and competing and part of that is due to the perspective I have on sport. The fact that one day I would go from seeing someone in a horrific road traffic accident or a really sad situation in obstetrics if something goes wrong with a birth, then the next day I am competing, it really makes you realise that not doing well in a competition isn’t the worst thing in the world.”

Inspired by watching Jessica Ennis-Hill at London 2012, Bryson spent her childhood traversing the south-west and competing in tetrathlons - the same sport as modern pentathlon without fencing. In Year 7, she met Plymouth’s hometown hero Heather Fell and got to wear the silver medal she won at Beijing 2008.

“From there it was a dream that flourished and it was a case of how I could get to the Olympics for Team GB,” said Bryson.

Bryson’s NHS deanery has granted her a year off to pursue the Olympic dream. She is now one of over 1,000 elite athletes on UK Sport’s National Lottery-funded World Class Programme, allowing her to train full time, have access to the world’s best coaches and benefit from pioneering medical support.

“I had a difficult journey before funding and I was reliant on my family so I'm so grateful to them,” said Bryson. “I used to have to pay my own way so getting that funding from The National Lottery has been game-changing for me, just really being able to live. It's made a massive difference on my journey to the Olympics.”

National Lottery players raise more than £30million a week for good causes including vital funding into sport – from grassroots to elite. To find out more visit: www.lotterygoodcauses.org.uk #TNLAthletes