From Olympic heartbreak to Adobe leadership: Head of Business Strategy Chris Lambert

Few experiences seem more nerve-wracking than competing at the Olympics. The eyes of the world are watching you. The expectations of an entire country are on your shoulders. Stakes like these can rattle even the most fearless of elite athletes.

“Let me tell you about nerves,” says Chris Lambert, a former sprinter for Team Great Britain who works as Adobe’s head of business strategy and operations across the UK, Ireland, the Middle East, and South Africa. “You walk out into the Olympic stadium, your dream on the line, and you don’t know if your hamstring is going to come out in one piece. There’s not much else that’s going to make me too nervous, to be honest.”

In his current role at Adobe, Lambert is almost never nervous. Occasionally, when he’s walking into an important meeting with high-level business leaders, or flying around the world to explore an opportunity for international expansion, colleagues will wonder why he’s not worried.

“I don’t worry about things unless I’m not prepared, and if I’m not prepared, that’s on me,” Lambert says. “I think sport really helps do that. What am I actually concerned about here? Very little, so let’s carry on.”

The poise and perspective Lambert brings to his job now comes partly from the essential confidence of an elite athlete, a calm coolness forged under sport’s brightest lights on the planet’s biggest stage. But his self-assurance is also the result of what happened in that Olympic stadium 20 years ago, a poignant experience he never imagined that taught hard lessons and left hardened character traits.

During the Olympics, we are captivated by the extraordinary abilities and performances of exceptional athletes, and also compelled by inspiring stories of their human spirit, determination, and resilience. This is Lambert’s story of preparation and performance, poise and pain, perseverance and perspective.

Preparation

In the early 2000s, Lambert was on top of the sports world, one of the most exciting young sprinters preparing for his first Olympic Games. The London-born Lambert finished third at the European Junior Championships in 1999, ran the fastest time in the world over 200m for an under-20 athlete, and broke multiple Ivy League records on the track team at Harvard University. After graduating in 2003, Lambert turned professional, winning gold in the 200m in record time and another gold in the 4x100-meter relay at the 2003 European Athletics U23 Championships.

In July 2004, as Lambert won races across England and secured his spot on the Team Great Britain athletics squad heading to the Athens Olympics in August, a Guardian article heralded, “Glory beckons for a new 200m star,” calling him “one of Britain’s most eye-catching sprinters.” While making the team was a massive achievement, Lambert knew he could be better — faster. He planned to peak at the Games, which meant shaving a few more hundredths of a second off his 200-meter time.

Striving to get 20.5 seconds down to 20.3 and then to 20.1, he could feel himself overdoing it, trying too hard. The night before Team Great Britain was due to fly out to training camp, and three weeks before he was set to compete in Greece, Lambert pulled his hamstring. It was a crushing blow — a troublesome injury he’d suffered before and one that threatened his Olympic hopes. The physiotherapists, though, were cautiously optimistic. The journey would be difficult, and it would hurt a lot, but he could be ready to run at the Games.

For two weeks at training camp, while his teammates prepared for their events, Lambert underwent a treatment cycle of seemingly endless anti-inflammatory and mineral injections — 15 in the morning, 30 at night of zinc, magnesium, potassium, anything that could boost healing, fix the tendon, and accelerate recovery.

Incredibly, the round-the-clock rehab worked, and Lambert was cleared to run. Despite weeks off the track, if he could clock a successful time trial, he could run the 200-meter qualification race in Athens just two days later. If not, he would be withdrawn from the event and replaced.

The session was two 150-meter runs. In the first one, Lambert was quick but cautious, careful to avoid re-injury. His coach told him to run the second one like he had nothing to lose. Lambert remembers blazing around the track, aggressive and strong, and the amazing feeling that the muscle was OK. He remembers standing in the shadow of the stadium afterward and having a moment of intense emotion: He’d done it. He’d earned his place. Now he had two days to get ready to race at the Olympics.

Performance mentality

When Lambert was hired at Adobe in 2021, his VP told him he was likely to have a different role every year, given his adaptable talents and ability to learn fast, think strategically, and solve problems. And, in fact, he’s had four roles in four years, moving from regional sales to global business strategy.

He says he gets a lot of “loose remits,” complex and wide-ranging projects where he plays part consultant and part fixer for the company, with the freedom to work more independently and “figure out what needs to be done and do it.” Many of the characteristics and attitudes he developed as an elite athlete, Lambert says, “have really driven my career here.”

A 2004 BBC article depicted the rising athletic star as “quiet, well-spoken, and calm.” Today, Lambert is still the picture of affable composure, casually chatting about his approach to shaping Adobe’s global business strategy while waiting for a train in the bustling London Underground. It’s an approach he took straight from sport — all preparation and performance mentality.

“You’re either prepared or you’re not,” Lambert says. “You know the level you’re trying to prepare at because there’s a clock there, and a clock doesn’t lie.”

“I feel like corporate life often needs cut-through. If I can’t give a go, no-go on a deal or a big decision, then do I really know it well enough? It’s very much the sport mentality. If I’ve got to run a qualifying standard, I have to finish in a certain place in a race. I mean, I’m either physically capable of it or I’m not. If I am, awesome, now I’ve got to deliver. If I’m not, I’ve got to prepare more.”

Poise

On a steamy, stunning Mediterranean morning in August 2004, there was no further preparation to be done. Lambert’s training had been far from ideal, but he was at the Athens Olympic Stadium and he was ready to race. Sitting with the other sprinters in his 200-meter heat on little plastic school chairs in a room underneath the stadium, the preternaturally cool Lambert recalls how his insides dropped when he stood up for the final call.

He remembers walking down the long underground tunnel to the main track, wearing his headphones and trying to focus, the tunnel ramping up to a bright opening in the stands. He remembers looking out from that opening and seeing the Olympic flame right there in front of him, a stadium completely packed with people, and noise that shook the ground. And he remembers his first thought: There’s absolutely no way I’m going out there.

Lambert didn’t even do a final warm-up because he was in a corner under the stand having a word with himself. Pull it together, he said. This is the Olympic Games, man. You’re gonna go out there and do your thing.

And just like that, he was fine. Lambert walked up the track to the starting line, feeling more at ease as he passed screaming fans waving British flags, and did his normal strides and shakeouts. Lambert was in the lane next to Namibia’s Frankie Fredericks, a four-time silver medalist and one of Lambert’s sporting heroes, who was racing in his last international competition.

The starting gun fired, and the sprinters were off. Lambert had a good reaction time and was near the front of the pack at the first turn, a strong position for a runner known for his upright style and ability to pick up speed. He was stride-for-stride with Fredericks at about the 50-meter mark when he felt it — a tweak in his hamstring. He pulled up, abruptly awoken from dream into nightmare. In the blink of an eye, his race was done.

Photographer images capture the moments in excruciating perfection. First, a sudden grimace on Lambert’s face as he comes around the turn — then, down on his knees, looking up to the sky — and finally, walking off the track holding his head in his hand. The pictures in Lambert’s memory are just as gutting. The backs of all the other runners racing on to the finish line. The two burly stadium operations guys coming over to tell him he needed to get off the track so the TV schedule would not be interrupted. The BBC interview where he tried to stay composed while saying something about how his dream was gone, as a friend standing nearby cried her eyes out.

Lambert described the experience in a 2016 interview on the Trackcastic podcast: “You’ve spent your whole life waiting for this and working for it, and then it’s gone in an instant. There’s no mercy, there’s no commiseration — it’s just over. And then you’re out on the track with your backpack on and the Olympics are over, and that’s it.”

Pain

Indeed, Lambert’s Olympics were over, but as he says now, “it was actually a bit worse than that.” A few days later, his experience as a noncompetitor would be almost as agonizing.

Originally, before the Olympics, Lambert planned to be on Great Britain’s 4x100-meter relay team. He was expected to join Jason Gardener, Darren Campbell, and Mark Lewis-Francis and run third in the relay, among the most high-profile athletics events. But when he suffered the hamstring injury just before training camp, despite being able to rehab and prepare for his own individual event, Lambert knew the relay team needed someone who could practice with the team. So he went to the coach and told him he wouldn’t make the decision difficult. The coach thanked Lambert for his maturity and replaced him with Marlon Devonish.

At the Games, the United States were heavy favorites, and the Americans’ swaggering relay squad produced the fastest overall time in Round 1. The next day, August 28, 2004, Lambert sat in the stands with former track athletes Christian Malcolm and John Capel — a Brit and an American, respectively — to watch the final.

As the race started, the US and Great Britain were neck and neck, but going into the third leg, the Americans botched their baton handoff. Lambert recalls seeing the runners come around the bend on the last change and realizing the British had a chance to win.

“You see Mark coming down and you’re bellowing for him to get it, and everyone is going nuts and they cross the line and his arm goes up and you’re like, ‘YEAH! Oh… that could’ve been my Olympic gold medal.’ And then we sort of looked around and were like, ‘Let’s just go to the beer tents.”

Lambert would later describe the feeling as “undercover envy,” and he says it took a while before he was able to watch a track meet again. Four years after he retired from professional athletics in 2008 from stress fracture complications in his right tibia, he worked on the organizing committee for the 2012 London Olympics. “I actually found that quite traumatic in a way that I wasn’t expecting,” he says, “because it was meant to be my hometown homecoming, [the] last games of three of a successful career, and it obviously was not.”

The pain eventually went away, but the 2004 Olympics still left its mark on Lambert. While he surely wasn’t looking for silver linings, he says he’s certain that the experience changed him — made him stronger, more resilient, better able to face challenges and overcome adversity. Moving from sports to the corporate world, he’s brought poise, problem-solving, perseverance, and the performance mentality of an elite athlete.

When Lambert joined Adobe after more than a decade spent working in recruitment, management consulting, and digital marketing for companies around the UK, he gave a talk during which he shared his Olympic story. An executive asked him how he was able to come back from that ordeal.

“I’m like, ‘Well, genuinely, what else are you going to do?’ To me, it’s binary,” Lambert says. “In sport, you’re either going to come back to the track the next day as ever, or you’re not. And if you are, then yeah, what happened there hurts, but it doesn’t stop your legs from moving one in front of the other. It’s a mentality.

Lambert pauses. “Now, did I need to miss out on an Olympic gold medal to learn that lesson? No, I did not,” he says laughing. “You don’t have to go to those depths to learn that, but they do concrete the lesson that if I can come back from that, I’ll be fine.”

Perspective

In sport, and especially at the Olympics, athletes are glorified, imbued with almost supernatural abilities. People talk about their focus, sacrifice, and courage, qualities they certainly have in abundance. But to Lambert, it’s just the normal state of mind for an athlete — you’ve got something to do, so you have to do it. It’s the performance mentality that he brings to his job at Adobe now, shaped and strengthened in Athens 20 years ago.

“If I’m like, ‘Man, that’s a lot of work to do. It’s probably going to take 16 hours.’ Well, I do have 16 hours in these 24,” Lambert says. “That’s not a healthy mindset, but it’s a reserve that you can draw down from. You just go into work mode and come out when you’re done. And that’s very much the athlete mentality, saying like, ‘What’s the session today? Oh, geez, I do not want to do that.’ But are you going to do it or not do it? You’re going to do it, so stop talking about it and just do it. That’s a very much an indelible athlete thing that corporates love.”

Lambert has surely always possessed many of the traits that make him a successful business leader. But it was the experience of pushing himself — to the limit of his natural ability, to his pain threshold, to get back up again and again, to keep getting better — and of being prepared for everything, then having to re-prepare when the worst thing happens, which give him such valuable perspective in his post-sports life.

Lambert says a lot of the feedback he receives is about how he’s a “very calming presence” who’s good at taking the heat out of situations.

“I’ve been in the hardest situation I’m probably ever — with my life not at risk — going to be in,” Lambert says. “It’s not like I walk in, and in my head, I compare it to the Olympics; it’s just an embedded lesson. If I prepare, I’ll always be fine.”

At Adobe, Lambert is also the global executive co-chair of the Black Employee Network, a volunteer position that bridges the employee resource group and the company to help ensure network members have the support, visibility, and resources to thrive at Adobe.

Being a socially conscious leader has been a central theme of Lambert’s life and career, both in and out of sports. As an athlete, he’s been outspoken on issues like performance-enhancing drugs and racism. He has also served as a BRIT ambassador, working to improve young adult mental health throughout the UK.

The 2024 edition in Paris marks the fifth Summer Games since Lambert’s Olympics. While it was difficult to watch in 2008 — he remembers being on crutches due to his stress fracture and thinking that Usain Bolt had changed the game — and painful in 2012 after he’d retired and was working at the London Games, he’s long since found peace and other fulfillment.

The sport has moved on, he says, and now he’s able to really enjoy and appreciate it again. Of course, he plans to watch these Games and is particularly excited about the women’s sprints. He’ll be cheering for Great Britain and Jamaica (Lambert’s mother is Jamaican), though he admits American superstar Sha’Carri Richardson “might have something to say about it.”

Today, Lambert is happy to experience the Olympics for what it is: a stirring global spectacle of the world’s best athletes showing what preparation, performance mentality, poise, and perseverance look like.

“My inner competitor can rest,” he says. “I can’t look wistfully at the kit box anymore and say, ‘I’ve still got some spikes in there — these youngins don’t know what's coming.’ I’m an old man now. So, I can actually rest properly and just enjoy it.”