Charlotte Metcalfe Pursues Olympics After Daunting Brain Injury

Forbes

10-06-2025

Charlotte Metcalfe overcame a brain injury that coincided with her silver medal lift at last fall's ... More World Championships. Her ultimate goal is the 2028 Olympics.
Charlotte Metcalfe says that when she first got into competitive weightlifting, she was given some advice by her coaches. They told her, "Remove all emotional attachment to pain."
'That tells you everything I think you need to know about the sport,' Metcalfe joked.
The 21-year-old English powerlifter took that advice, along with other bits of weightlifting wisdom on everything from nutrition to the intensity and consistency of her workouts last year, as she prepared for the Global Powerlifting Committee (GPC) World Championships in Slovakia. Little did Metcalfe know that she wasn't just powering through pain, but had something else going on in her body.
Alongside the usual burn and muscle ache after her daily routine of squats and deadlifts, Metcalfe said she felt unusual symptoms and some fatigue that just didn't feel right. Just a month before Slovakia, Metcalfe hit her head on a barbell at her local gym, initially thinking her injury was nothing to worry about.
'Weightlifting is definitely taxing,' Metcalfe said, over our recent Zoom interview. 'Each lift that you do temporarily increases intracranial pressure.' But Metcalfe said that weightlifting, just like bodybuilding and martial arts, present 'so many risks' that athletes sometimes can become desensitized.
The symptoms came at different times after hitting her head, but eventually got worse. Soon enough, the pain became unbearable. Metcalfe explained that while training further, her spatial awareness started to become 'awful.'
And despite experiencing recurring headaches and bouts of fatigue, she chose to compete and flew out to the continent anyway. There, on the first weekend of October, Metcalfe went on to win a silver medal at the GPC World Championships.
As it turned out, the English powerlifter suffered a brain injury just weeks before that major competition. Unaware of her condition, Metcalfe had suffered a potentially deadly subarachnoid haemorrhage, or bleeding on and around her brain.
'It was a matter of risk, but does the risk outweigh the opportunities?' she said she thought at the time. Now, looking back, she feels that her decision to try to ignore her headache was a misstep. In March 2025, during an interview with the Manchester Evening News, Metcalfe went so far as to call her choice to compete 'a mistake that almost killed me.'
The remedy for her brain injury entailed spending an initial 16 hours in a hospital for standard neurological tests. Thereafter, she was sent home to rest, spending the next two weeks in bed before having a follow-up brain scan.
Another thing that may have led to her brain injury, she said, is the fact that over the years she had eight prior concussions. She felt that they were definitely a factor.
'Typically, when injured, I adapt,' Metcae added. 'I train around it, shift focus, and keep going. If it's upper, I train lower. But the brain injury stopped everything.'
Despite her efforts to continue training and reclaim some normalcy, Metcalfe said that a terrifying episode after a 573-pound leg press forced her to stop. And when she could not lift, Metcalfe explained, 'For the first time, I felt like an athlete without a sport.'
At the World Championships, Metcalfe saw a competitor achieve a 100kg deadlift and decided to push herself beyond her normal limits. Drained and in pain, and again feeling a fatigue like she'd never felt before, Metcalfe pulled off a personal best of 112.5 kg and won the silver medal in the 2024 World Championships.
Metcalfe poses with her silver medal after the 2024 GPC Weightlifting World Championships in Trnava, ... More Slovakia.
Despite her risky gambit, Metcalfe, who is studying to be an attorney at the University of Law in Manchester, England, admits that her sport has helped her through some of the most difficult times of her life.
'I always loved combat sports, mixed martial arts like Muay Thai, and my weightlifting came from that," Metcalfe explained. "But as a sport, weightlifting forces you to be present. It was a very grounded move for me.'
Once she began a lifting routine for strength and personal fitness, she quickly moved to powerlifting at the end of 2023. Metcalfe said she took up Olympic-style lifting the following summer, and in the mix soon established an impressive set of personal bests, and others started to take notice.
'One of the guys at my gym asked me if I had ever considered competing. Up to then, I hadn't really thought about it.'
Acknowledging the risks she took last fall, Metcalfe said she hopes others will be more cautious and urges young athletes to take head injuries seriously.
Now, several months after her second-place finish and dealing with post-concussion syndrome, Metcalfe explained that she's altered her weightlifting and fitness routines, as well as her self-care and nutrition.
As a law student, Metcalfe is set to finish law school in 2026 and find gainful employment as a barrister, a role akin to a litigation attorney, as it's called in the U.S. After being 'called to the bar,' Metcalfe plans to start her work immediately.
'I'll be 24 for (the 2028 Olympics in) L.A. Typically, weightlifters can be in their prime into their late twenties and thirties. I'll plan to be doing full-time law, and full-time weightlifting,' Metcalfe said, 'for the next five to eight years.'
And yet, Metcalfe has another big goal on the horizon: making Great Britain's 2028 Olympic team.
She said that to prepare for the Olympic trials, she will shift her focus from powerlifting, which emphasizes maximal strength in the squats and deadlifts, to Olympic-style weightlifting, which focuses on explosive power, speed, and technical skill, primarily through two main lifts: the snatch and the clean and jerk.
Along the way, Metcalfe plans to vie for a spot in the upcoming Commonwealth Games, which take place next year, from July 23 to August 2, 2026.
Fellow Team GB powerlifter, Roza De Oliveira, who competed alongside Metcalfe at last fall's World Championships, thinks his teammate has what it takes to compete at the highest level.
De Oliveira says Metcalfe possesses the right skillset for the Commonwealth Games and the Olympics, and describes her in the following way: 'Truly believes in her own capabilities and will never second-guess herself in the process. Always consistent in her character. Filled with confidence.'
'It's not just the discipline or integrity,' De Oliveira concludes, 'but (her) refusing to compromise on who she is, no matter how hard it gets.'