Helen Richardson-Walsh

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Helen Richardson-Walsh (née Richardson, born 23 September 1981) is an English field hockey player who plays as a midfielder. She has been a member of both the England and the Great Britain women's field hockey teams since 1999, and was a member of the Great Britain team that won gold at the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Early life
Helen Richardson was born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire and grew up in Nottingham. She began playing hockey at a young age, joining West Bridgford Hockey Club at the age of seven. She attended West Bridgford School and South Nottingham College.

Career
Richardson played for West Bridgford and Sherwood Hockey Clubs before joining Leicester Hockey Club. She won her first England cap in 1999, at the age of 17. At age 18 she was a member of the Great Britain team at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, becoming the youngest female hockey player to represent Great Britain at an Olympic Games.

Richardson was a member of the silver medal-winning England team at the 2002 Commonwealth Games. After the 2002 World Cup she underwent three operations on her ankle, returning to the sport in 2004.

Richardson won bronze medals with the England team at the 2006 and 2010 Commonwealth Games. She competed in her second Olympics in 2008, where Great Britain did not advance to the semi-finals. After the 2008 Olympics she spent a year playing for HC Den Bosch in the Netherlands before returning to England, after which she played for Reading Hockey Club for seven years.

Richardson was part of the Great Britain team that won the bronze medal at the 2012 Olympics in London, captaining the team for two games after regular captain Kate Walsh broke her jaw in the opening match. Between 2013 and 2014 she underwent surgery twice for spinal disc herniation. She was left out of the England squad for the 2014 World Cup, but returned to international hockey with the Great Britain team in April 2015. In August 2015 she was part of the England team that won the EuroHockey Nations Championship for the first time, scoring a penalty in the gold medal match penalty shoot-out against the Netherlands.

Richardson-Walsh was a member of the Great Britain team that won the gold medal at the 2016 Summer Olympics, the first time that Great Britain had won gold in women's hockey. She scored one of Great Britain's two penalties in the deciding penalty shoot-out in the final against the Netherlands. Richardson-Walsh announced that she would leave Reading Hockey Club to join HC Bloemendaal in the Netherlands after the Olympics, and suggested that she would retire from international hockey.

Awards
In 2009 she was shortlisted for the International Hockey Federation's World Player of the Year Award. In 2010 she was named as Player of the Year by the Hockey Writers' Club, and BOA Athlete of the Year by Great Britain Hockey.

Personal life
In 2008 she began a relationship with her Great Britain and England teammate Kate Walsh. They married in 2013, and both adopted the surname Richardson-Walsh.

Both Kate and Helen Richardson-Walsh were members of the gold medal-winning Great Britain team at the 2016 Olympics; this made them the first same-sex married couple to win Olympic gold as part of the same team, and the first British married couple to win gold as part of the same team since 1920.

Richardson-Walsh is studying for a degree in psychology with the Open University.