Elite sports chaplain Ashley Null: ‘The gospel is the antidote to performance-based identity’

Dr Ashley Null effortlessly combines his fierce intellect with a pastoral heart. He opens up to Emma Fowle about the pressures of elite performance, and why identity in God is the only place to find true joy 

We’re not two minutes into our interview before Rev Canon Dr Ashley Null starts weeping gently. 

It is not what I was expecting. 

The danger with the relentless researching of your subject in preparation for an interview is that you’re bound to make some assumptions. My first was that Null, a Yale and Cambridge alumnus who is a leading expert on Thomas Cranmer and the theology of the English Reformation, might be intimidatingly intellectual and inaccessible to us mere mortals.