Dr Jo Larkin

Dr Larkin is a specialist in Sport and Exercise Medicine with wide-ranging experience across elite sport, high-performance environments, and the treatment of musculoskeletal conditions in physically active individuals, including recreational athletes and city professionals. She currently serves as Global Medical Director for SailGP, the international F50 racing series, and previously held the role of Chief Medical Officer for the Lawn Tennis Association. Her career has included participation in two Olympic Games and one Paralympic Games. During London 2012, she worked as a sports physician in the athletes’ village polyclinic and also led the field-of-play medical team in the athletics stadium. She later travelled to Rio as team physician for the Great Britain men’s and women’s rugby sevens squads, where the men achieved a silver medal.

For eight years, Dr Larkin worked with England Rugby across multiple teams, developing a particular interest in women’s health and athletic performance. She also supported the Rugby World Cup in 2015 in the roles of immediate care doctor and area medical officer. Her clinical experience spans a wide variety of sports, including academy football, rugby, hockey, ice hockey, and GB disability target shooting, and she has worked extensively with both international men’s and women’s teams as well as younger athletes.

Her work within the Armed Forces at DMRC Headley Court, where she served as Clinical Lead for Spines Rehabilitation, shaped her specialist focus on chronic pain and the complex physical, psychological, and social factors that influence long-term musculoskeletal conditions.

Alongside her clinical practice, Dr Larkin holds a number of national and international professional appointments, including roles with SailGP, England Rugby, and GB Rugby Sevens, and she is actively involved in medical governance and education through the Faculty of Sports and Exercise Medicine and the Royal College of Physicians Sport and Exercise Medicine Committee. She also contributes to sport safety as an RFU Immediate Care in Sport Instructor and an International Paralympic Classifier.

Dr Larkin maintains a strong academic profile and teaches on postgraduate Sports Medicine programmes at University College London and CNELM. She has contributed to Ministry of Defence best-practice guidance for low back pain and has published widely, including research in the Emergency Medicine Journal (BMJ) on cardiac biomarkers in marathon runners. Her written work also includes publications for Pulse, contributions to the BJSM blog, letters to the BMJ on exercise and depression, and public health needs assessments addressing physical activity in cancer survivors. She is a contributing author to SEM: A Fresh Approach, the Tower Hamlets Physical Activity Care Pathway for Adults, and the BMA Sports Injuries Book, to which she contributed four chapters.

Dr Larkin is a Fellow of the Faculty of Sports and Exercise Medicine and a member of both the British Association of Sport and Exercise Medicine and the Royal Society of Medicine.