Tess Olofsson opens up about the job as a football referee in Summer in P1. The physical pressure in the job is great, and also affects private life, such as plans to have children. She also talks about threats and hatred related to her role.
– It has happened that I have been given a police escort after the match or that my colleagues have had to drive me home, because it has not been suitable for me to take the train back to the hotel, she says.
An important issue for her has been the balance between elite sports and family life.
– Of course, there is a worry: if I become pregnant now, will I be able to return to the same form? She says in the program.
Olofsson describes how her decision about pregnancy was affected by her career.
– I had decided already as a young person that I wanted to become a mother and I wanted to do it early in life. But then suddenly football came into the picture and I became a Fifa referee and then I put it on pause a bit.
It was her wife who eventually carried their first child. The plan was for Tess to carry the second - but then her career took off again.
– Suddenly I started making progress in football and I started taking the next step and stepped up to the men's elite level.
Tess met her wife during police training in Malmö.
– After we were finished with that, I started to feel that there was something more there. I could not put words to it and I had never been together with a girl before.
The feelings turned out to be mutual.
– It was completely unbeatable, it tingled in the whole body. You felt love in the stomach, it was an indescribable feeling, I have probably never felt as strongly as I did then for my wife.
