Ebony Rainford-Brent MBE

Ebony Rainford-Brent MBE is a World Cup-winning cricketer, broadcaster, performance coach and campaigner for inclusion in sport. The first Black woman to play for England women's cricket team, she speaks about peak performance, mindset and building opportunity for people who have been left out.

Ebony was part of the England squad that won the ICC Women's Cricket World Cup in Sydney in 2009. In the months that followed the team also won the ICC Women's World Twenty20, the NatWest one-day series and retained the Ashes. She captained the Surrey women's team, and in 2015 became Surrey County Cricket Club's first Director of Women's Cricket.

She has built a broadcasting career across the game. She joined BBC Test Match Special in 2012 and the Sky Sports commentary team in 2020, and has worked with TNT Sports and Channel 4. She has fronted Sky's coverage of The Hundred and the BBC's White Ball Series, and has presented and commentated on ICC events, the WPL, WBBL and IPL. From 2021 to 2023 she hosted The Women's Sport Show on BBC Radio London, and in 2025 she published Test Match Special: How to Read Cricket.

In 2020 Ebony launched Surrey's African-Caribbean Engagement (ACE) Programme, which she chairs. ACE works to widen access to cricket for young people from Black communities and had reached 10,000 children by early 2023. She is also an ambassador for Beyond Sport.

Through her podcast The Art of Success she interviews high performers from different fields about the tools behind their results, and as a performance coach she uses her Five Fundamentals of Peak Performance to help people make small changes in mindset and habits that add up. She has worked with brands including Galaxy, Actimel, Toyota, Sage and Spotify.

Ebony was appointed MBE in the 2021 Birthday Honours for services to cricket and charity, and received the Freedom of the City of London in 2020. She brings audiences a mix of elite sport, broadcasting and hands-on leadership, and encourages them to challenge themselves and see through a different lens.