Hollie Olding: "I was told I wouldn’t play again"

Yet nothing could have prepared then-20-year-old Hollie Olding, living thousands of miles away from any friends or family, for the news that her dream was over before it had really began.

This article was first published on the 10th February 2023, and has been republished as part of Palace's International Women's Day celebrations of women at the heart of the club.

Four years ago, Olding – then a college student at the University of Pittsburgh, and a promising England youth international – received a life-changing diagnosis: she would require career-ending heart surgery.

Her status as a Palace Women’s player today is testament to not only her bravery, but her resolve, in the face of such adversity.

Originally recounting her story in British Heart Month – an annual campaign run by the British Heart Foundation to raise awareness of a variety of heart conditions and how we can work together to save lives – Olding’s tale began when she started to experience groin pain after a transatlantic flight.

Olding had moved to the United States as a 17-year-old to pursue the opportunity to both play football and continue her education, and had suffered fleeting groin injuries in the past – but this time, the pain only grew worse.

Having developed a cough and difficulty breathing in the following months, Olding was at first diagnosed with pneumonia – but a subsequent test revealed the presence of blood clots in both lungs.

“Pulmonary embolism (PE) is blood clots in your lungs,” Olding explained. “They’re also commonly known as DBTs, which are blood clots in your legs. I was diagnosed with PE, so most of my left lung was filled with blood clots, and some in my right.

“It was caused by the contraceptive pill and a lot of flying. I was in the States at the time, studying at University, and we’d have to charter flights to a lot of our games.

“I didn’t have a clue what PE was. I was only 19-years-old at the time and had no idea. I remember, when I was in the emergency room and my physio was like ‘it could be this’, I just batted it off.

“Obviously when I was diagnosed, I had extensive chats with doctors. It was quite a big condition. I remember when I went into hospital, the doctor was amazed I was able to walk upstairs and I was smiling and I was still active, because what I had was so intense. To see me, a 20-year-old, an athlete, coming through the door, they were shocked.

“I was put on a six-month treatment plan – blood thinners for six months – and that meant I couldn’t do any contact sports. I’d had injuries before, but nothing I was out for six months with.

“At three months, they wanted to repeat the test, to make sure the clots looked like they were going, and so I had another set of tests.”

Thousands of miles away from her family and friends, Olding heard the words she had been dreading.

“I was living on my own in the States. The consultant told me that the blood clot looked like it was blocking the blood flow to my heart, so I was told, on my own with the consultant and with my Mum on the phone, that I needed heart surgery, and I wouldn’t play football again.

“I went through a week-to-ten-days process of: ‘Wow, this is going to change my life.’ In a way, I was glad I was at Uni because I had something to fall back on.

“Then, my doctor called me a week later and said: ‘We’ve read the results wrong, and you don’t need heart surgery.’ It was a whirlwind because I’d gone from a six-month blood thinner medication every day to being told I’d need heart surgery.”

Thankfully, that did not prove to be the case, but with the global pandemic forcing a sporting shutdown in 2020, Olding – having already gone through so much at such a young age – was forced to show even further resolve.

Finishing her degree online, the footballer set her sights on returning to the game she thought she would have to abandon forever.

She explained: “COVID happened, so I came back home [from America], and it gave the me the chance to get back up to speed with the rest of the world because football stopped. I felt like I could use it as a chance to get my fitness back. It gave me that time to recover.

“I’m not going to lie, I really struggled [with the diagnosis], especially with the whole concept of it. I wasn’t in a good space in America because I was alone.

"I had amazing support out there – my coaches, and my physio, who was like a lifesaver to me – but I really struggled, because no-one knew what PE was and it was hard for me to explain to them what it was, so nobody knew what I was going through.

“It was very lonely and I suffered quite badly with depression. I had talks with club doctors about going on medication, but I thought: ‘I don’t want to do anything like that. I’ll get through this. I know I’ll overcome this’.

“Footballers and people generally have to be resilient, and I knew I’d need to be resilient to work on myself. I feel like a much better person for going through that.

“Now I don’t take for granted a session, or a game. I’m grateful to be playing. I’m grateful to be doing this as a profession, but at the same time, you have to realise that football isn’t everything. Your health really comes first.

“Everyone struggles with battles. It doesn’t matter if they speak about it, everyone goes through things, so I think for me it was [having] the understanding that the girls may come into training all smiling and bubbling, but they might have stuff going on outside. It was that realisation that there’s more to life than football.”

Now 24-years-old, Olding is fit, healthy and – as she so aptly demonstrated with a sumptuous strike in the FA Cup third round against Watford last month – firing on all cylinders.

But the growth Olding showed in overcoming such a harrowing set of circumstances is not the only admirable aspect of her story: so too is her desire to proliferate an understanding of how it came about.

She explains: “There’s not much research into contraceptives and even periods in general in the women’s game. Especially now, you see it with all the knee injuries that are going on, so more needs to be done.

“Even though my story doesn’t relate to injuries in that sense, as women we don’t know what we’re putting into our bodies, and as professional athletes, it’s having that balance of understanding what we’re doing as women and also that how can counteract our profession on the pitch.

“Football is still a male-dominated sport and obviously, you’ve got more men’s coaches than women’s coaches, and more men’s staff than women’s staff.

“I think, in women’s football, it’s that conversation. You have to be open and honest, because this is life, and every woman goes through this.

“I think it’s definitely starting to become talked about more, but we can drive it forwards so much more, and we just need to keep having these honest conversations with male staff.”

Olding’s challenge might have seemed gargantuan – but it was no match for her mentality, which remains colossal.

Find out more about British Heart Month on the British Heart Foundation website.