Victoria Gosling OBE

Victoria Gosling spent 21 years in the Royal Air Force, rising to the rank of Group Captain.

Before the inaugural Invictus Games, she was Base Support Commander at RAF Benson, a support helicopter base of around 2,000 personnel providing operational support to Afghanistan.

It was a career built around leadership under pressure. But Gosling had also seen something else within the military: what sport could offer people recovering from injury and illness.

In 2014, she became Military Executive Lead for the first Invictus Games in London, helping bring more than 400 wounded, injured and sick service personnel and veterans from 13 nations together in competitive adaptive sport.

Two years later, she became CEO of the Orlando Games, where the movement grew to 487 competitors from 14 nations.

The transition out of the RAF did not take Gosling away from the principles that had shaped her military career. It gave her a different place to apply them.

Since then, she has built a second career across elite and adaptive sport. She has led GB Snowsport since 2018, chairs GB Surfing and now chairs the Invictus Games Birmingham 2027 – bringing the Games back to the UK for the first time since that inaugural event.

In 2026, she was also elected to the International Ski Federation Council and appointed one of its Vice Presidents.

Gosling left military service, but not the question at the heart of it: what helps people find confidence, purpose and possibility when the circumstances around them have changed?

Sport became her answer.