“I used to be the best in the world at something and suddenly, here I was no good at anything,” she recalls of a time when she was close to broke. “No one wanted me. And I’ve got this drive I can’t switch off, I want to be good at something, I want to achieve, I’ve got nowhere to put it.”

However, even as her finances sank, her natural inclination, honed after years in sport, was to pretend that nothing was awry. “A sports person trades in confidence,” she says. “You cannot show a hint of weakness. When I was struggling, I thought I needed to show outwardly everything was fine. That was counterproductive. My refusal to admit I was losing meant I couldn’t properly see a way through.”

It is, she suggests, a trait to which female athletes are particularly prone. “I would say it’s worse for women. You have been brought up to show not a chink of weakness. You have heard the sneers of, ‘oh she’s on her period’, so you double down. Vulnerability is not a word you ever want associated with you.”

When she was doing research for her masters, Sayers discovered Emms’s response to her problems was all too common. “Totally, that’s a major issue,” Sayers says. “As a sportswoman you’re trained to show no sign of weakness. But what you need when you retire is advice. You need to seek help through friends, through colleagues. You need a way to figure out why you are feeling anxious.”

Emms found her way forward by writing a blog. The response, including from many former Olympians, was extraordinary. “I found it so comforting just to talk to people,” she says. “That’s what I would say to anyone who was in my position: reach out and talk. I sometimes wonder if I’d been more prepared to seek emotional help when I was still involved in sport it might have made me a better badminton player.”

Sayers agrees that putting aside the protective carapace athletes adopt is fundamental to finding a successful role in retirement. 

“I don’t think any athlete expects a new career put on a plate,” she says. “But what they might not initially realise is how much they will need to take advice and open up about what they want. My advice is, you can’t do it on your own.”

After putting down her javelin, Sayers herself has found significant point and purpose in developing a property investment company, as well as offering life coaching. “Would I employ a former sportswoman? Absolutely,” she says. “But first I would advise them, before they started, to ask themselves is this really the job they want to do?”