Specialty (re)insurance broker partners with GB Snowsport to convert ‘underdog’ mentality into Winter Olympic success

Global specialty (re)insurance broker McGill and Partners has teamed up with GB Snowsport, to back the elite British governing body and its associated athletes ahead of the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics and Paralympics in February and March 2026.

The London-headquartered broker agreed instantly to the partnership opportunity due to the “absolute parallels” between McGill and Partners and GB Snowsport, which are centred around “talent”, “teamwork” and the resilience of “underdogs”, according to Steve McGill, co-founder and chief executive at McGill and Partners.

Addressing journalists and company staff at a launch event held at the broker’s Leadenhall office on 24 September 2025, McGill explained: “Much of what GB Snowsport is doing is a mirror image on the sports side to what we’ve been doing in business, which is why we’re super excited about the partnership.”

Vicky Gosling, chief executive at GB Snowsport, added: “The parallels that I draw when I look at [this partnership] is we invest in world class talent and it’s obvious to me that McGill and Partners clearly does something similar in terms of the way that it seeks talent and supports it. If you get talent and you support it well, then the results are unstoppable.”

‘Catalyst for success’

GB Snowsport is responsible for managing and developing programmes for British skiers and snowboarders across 12 Olympic and Paralympic disciplines. It leads these athletes during international events, as well as promotes participation in the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS) and World Para Snowsport disciplines.

For Gosling, the backing from McGill and Partners – either financial or in terms of boosting brand visibility – is “significant” for GB Snowsport and will certainly act as a “catalyst for success” as the organisation strives to make Britain a top five snowsport nation by 2030.

“The reality was we didn’t get funding for our summer training programme,” Gosling explained. “That was brutal because if we didn’t give [the athletes] summer training in preparation for Milano Cortina, we were going to be far behind our competitors.

“By creating this partnership, it made a significant difference in terms of what we could and couldn’t do in preparation for [the Winter Olympics and Paralympics] because every penny counts for us.

“[The partnership is a] catalyst for success. Creating partnerships outside of public funding will enable us to actually do what we need to do.”

Being the ‘underdogs’

Both McGill and Partners and GB Snowsport relate to being “underdogs”.

For the broker, this comes down to being a startup in a competitive marketplace, soft launching the business in October 2019 to now boasting 560 staff across 11 offices worldwide – however, McGill is still cognisant of the threat larger, global brokers pose to the organisation’s success, due to greater access to resources.

He stated that his firm’s success to date has been “down to talent and teamwork and the courage to go out there and be on the front foot”.

McGill continued: “We’ve been the underdogs and we fought like hell for six years with 560 hand-picked colleagues who worked as a team.

“What our company has achieved has been absolutely extraordinary and has not been achieved by a British firm in the last 50 years in the industry. What [GB Snowsport is doing] is an absolute parallel and we’re incredibly proud to be associated with it. Whatever support we can give, beyond money, we will give.”

Gosling saw GB Snowsport experience a similar underdog journey after she took the helm in 2018 – following the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit in the early 2020s, the GB Snowsport squad did not excel at 2022’s Beijing Winter Olympics.

“It was all about how you bounce back,” Gosling added.

An amplified narrative

Alongside financial support, McGill and Partners will also be backing GB Snowsport’s new content platform, The Edge Series, which aims to explore the parallels between sport and business – such as risk, resilience, innovation and talent.

Helping to tell this story at the launch event was alpine slalom skier Billy Major, snowboard cross athlete Charlotte Bankes and para snowboarder Ollie Hill.

Gosling is also hoping that the collaboration with McGill and Partners will help to “amplify” GB Snowsport’s story and winter sports more generally with Brits.

“[The partnership] creates an amplification of our narrative,” she said.

“People don’t know that we have 10 world champions. They know about football, they know about cricket. They don’t know that this nation actually is a real powerhouse in snowsport, quite frankly, compared to where it’s been in the past.

“The partnership is really helping us amplify what we stand for. It’s a smart way to do business.”