It was May 1991 and I was sitting in ‘The Good Samaritan’, a pub behind The London Hospital in Whitechapel. I was staring into my pint of ‘Bitter’ with a sense of a brooding contemplation. With me were the three other members of my study group, British doctors Mark Batt, Ian McCurdie and Phil Bell. We had just completed the graduation ceremony for our Diploma of Sports Medicine. The elation and euphoria of having successfully completed a formative year of study was giving way to more serious thoughts of the future. For each of us, the unsettling question kept raising its head. ‘What's next?’

In 1991, there was no clear pathway in the UK for sports medicine specialist recognition and certainly no pathway that included recognition within the National Health Service. In Australia and New Zealand, the Australasian College of Sports Physicians (ACSP) was just about to hold its first Part II Fellowship Examination, providing its inaugural cohort of Foundation Fellows but there was no formal training programme and also no recognition of Sport and Exercise Medicine (SEM) under the Australian or New Zealand medical systems. The year of study in London had given each of us a tantalising taste of what could possibly be. A career in sports medicine was the goal but the path ahead looked uncertain and insecure.

We each sought further training, ending up on very different paths. Mark Batt headed across the Atlantic for a Fellowship in Sports Medicine at the University of California, Davis. Ian McCurdie retrained as a Consultant in Rheumatology and Rehabilitation with the British Army and Phil Bell headed off into the private sector, starting with a training position at the London Bridge Hospital, before becoming Clinical Director of Musculoskeletal Services at Barbican Health and then joining BUPA Wellness. I headed …