Crista Cullen – Gold Olympian, Businesswoman & Conservationist – Co-creation

This week on Womanity, Dr. Amaleya Goneos-Malka speaks to Crista Cullen, Olympic gold-medal field hockey player, businesswoman, conservation innovator, and proud daughter of both Kenya and the United Kingdom. Crista’s story is one of dual identities, grit, reinvention, and a deep commitment to contributing to the world beyond sport. Crista shares insights from her sixteen-year Olympic journey that began with failure, missing qualification for Athens, evolved through the ups and downs of Beijing and London, before culminating triumphantly in Rio 2016, where Great Britain’s women’s team seized gold against all odds. Crista unpacks the power of shared culture, athlete-driven ownership, and unity of purpose, revealing how the squad built a high-performance environment anchored in trust, human connection, honest challenge, and collective responsibility. She draws striking parallels between elite sport, corporate leadership, and conservation, discussing how principles like accountability, inclusivity, and pressure simulation translate across sectors. She stresses the importance of creating cultures people genuinely buy into, not top-down mandates plastered on office walls, but values co-created by every voice in the room. Crista also shares the rarely discussed emotional terrain of athlete retirement. After leaving the sport once at her peak in 2012 and again post-Rio, she speaks candidly about identity loss, purpose rediscovery, and the courage to start again. Her return for Rio, after three years away from competitive hockey, is a compelling story of humility, determination, passion, teamwork, and how genuinely wanting to do something for yourself rather than fulfilling other people’s expectations drives your excellence. Now firmly rooted back in Kenya, Crista leads transformative work in conservation finance and community-led environmental solutions. Through the Tofauti Foundation, she merges her worlds of sport and conservation to drive innovative, sustainable models that challenge old dependency-based NGO approaches. She shares a powerful gender-centred success story from coastal Kenya, where repurposed aquaculture infrastructure and a partnership with “Crabs Alive” has enabled more than 200 women to develop sustainable livelihoods through mangrove crab farming, reducing overharvesting and generating stable income for families. This model demonstrates what becomes possible when women are trusted as partners and leaders. Crista closes the conversation with a message of grounded optimism: everyone faces bumps in the road, including those who appear successful. What matters is perseverance, curiosity, courage to challenge norms, and the belief that every detour still keeps you moving forward. Tune in for more.