Martine Wright
Most organisations talk about resilience in the abstract until something breaks, a restructure, a public failure, a personal crisis inside a leadership team, and discover their language is hollow. Staff can tell when wellbeing is a slide and when it is a discipline. Closing that gap takes someone who has actually rebuilt a life under pressure and can show what the work looked like, day to day.
Martine Wright MBE is a London 7/7 survivor, London 2012 Paralympian, and author of Unbroken who helps organisations turn resilience and inclusion from stated values into daily practice.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Martine Wright
- A first-hand account of recovery from catastrophic injury that gives leaders concrete language for talking about adversity, mental health, and return to work without slipping into platitudes.
- Paralympic-level perspective on marginal gains, team performance, and selection, drawn from competing for Great Britain in sitting volleyball at London 2012 rather than from a textbook.
- Credibility on inclusion and belonging that comes from being inside the disability sport system, not commenting on it. Useful for ERG launches, accessibility programmes, and culture work where lived authority matters.
- An MBE, the BBC Helen Rollason Award, and a Sports Book Award-winning memoir give buyers external validation that holds up in front of senior audiences.
- Consistent broadcast presence with the BBC and Channel 4, including Rio 2016 and Invictus Games, which translates into stage presence and timing that work in front of 10,000-seat audiences and intimate leadership rooms alike.
Biography highlights
- Survivor of the 7 July 2005 London bombings; was the last person extracted alive from the Aldgate carriage and lost both legs above the knee.
- Member of Great Britain’s women’s sitting volleyball team at the London 2012 Paralympic Games and later team captain.
- Appointed MBE in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to sport.
- Recipient of the BBC Helen Rollason Award at the 2012 BBC Sports Personality of the Year.
- Author of Unbroken: My Story of Survival from 7/7 Bombings to Paralympic Success (Simon and Schuster, 2017), winner of Autobiography of the Year at the 2018 Sports Book Awards.
- Broadcaster for the BBC and Channel 4, including roving reporter at the Rio 2016 Paralympics and Invictus Games coverage.
Biography
The Aldgate bomb on 7 July 2005 killed seven people in a single Circle Line carriage. Martine Wright was the last person brought out alive. She lost roughly eighty percent of her blood, spent a week in a coma, and underwent ten months of surgery and double above-knee amputation. The detail that matters for a corporate audience is what came after: a deliberate decision, sustained over years, to treat recovery as work rather than a wait.
That work led to elite sport. Wright took up sitting volleyball during rehabilitation, made the British squad, and was selected for the home Paralympic Games at London 2012, where Team GB fielded a women’s sitting volleyball side for the first time. She later captained the team and earned forty international caps. The 2012 BBC Helen Rollason Award and a 2016 MBE for services to sport followed.
Her memoir Unbroken (Simon and Schuster, 2017) won Autobiography of the Year at the 2018 Sports Book Awards and remains the primary text behind her speaking. Alongside the book, she has built a steady broadcast career with the BBC and Channel 4, covering the Rio 2016 Paralympics and Invictus Games, which gives her a level of stage craft most lived-experience speakers do not have.
What organisations actually book her for is the translation. Wright takes the language of marginal gains, team selection, mental health, and belonging out of the abstract and grounds it in specific decisions she made and watched others make. NatWest, the NHS, John Lewis, Deloitte, Salesforce, Pfizer, and Aon are among the named clients on her own record. The room leaves with usable vocabulary for the conversations leadership teams already know they need to have.
Key speaking topics
- Resilience and recovery from adversity
- Mental health and return to work
- Inclusion, disability, and belonging in the workplace
- Marginal gains and high-performance teams
- Change and uncertainty
- Paralympic sport and elite competition
- Leadership through crisis
Ideal for
- CHROs and people leaders rolling out wellbeing, mental health, or return-to-work programmes
- DEI leads and ERG sponsors building disability inclusion and belonging work
- Leadership teams briefing staff through restructures, crises, or major change programmes
- All-staff conferences and town halls where the brief calls for an authentic, high-impact keynote rather than a research talk
Audience outcomes
- A vocabulary for talking about adversity, mental health, and recovery that does not feel scripted.
- Specific examples of how marginal gains and team selection work inside an elite sport environment, drawn from London 2012.
- A sharper sense of what disability inclusion looks like from inside the experience, useful for shaping ERG and accessibility work.
- A reset on what is actually possible after a catastrophic setback, anchored in a verifiable personal story rather than abstract motivation.
Talks
A keynote built around the seven days she spent in a coma after the 7 July bombings and the choices that followed, taking the audience from the carriage at Aldgate to the Paralympic court at London 2012.
Key takeaways:
- How deliberate choice, repeated daily, becomes the practical mechanism of recovery.
- What marginal gains look like inside an elite team that started from zero.
- How lived experience of disability reframes inclusion and belonging at work.