Sustaining the dream

Hannah Mills hopes to become the most successful female Olympic sailor ever in Tokyo next year, but now she also has other things on her mind

- Hannah Mills

Ask Hannah Mills about the unthinkable – that the Olympics might be cancelled – and she replies evenly: “Obviously that thought crosses your mind, but the only thing you can do is to push it aside and just say ‘it’s irrelevant’. You can’t stop training, you can’t stop being motivated.

“If the Games don’t happen it’ll be a disaster. Of course there are doubts, but you push them aside.”

A gold in Tokyo next summer would make Hannah Mills, aged 32, the most successful female Olympic sailor of all time, having won silver in London and gold in Rio with Saskia Clark. The image of her and Clark embracing on the podium in Rio was one of the most moving of the Games and the culmination of a great sailing partnership. Afterwards Clark retired from Olympic competition and Mills considered it, but she’d seen something in Rio that she couldn’t forget. “Every beach, marina and coastal area we visited during that four-year period was affected and damaged beyond belief, and so much of it was single-use plastic.

“Post-Rio, once we’d won and I was thinking about whether to compete again, I was so moved by what I had seen that I felt maybe the best thing I could do was go and compete at Tokyo and be able to talk about this issue on my journey, raising awareness and trying to change people’s attitudes.”

She got the backing of the International Olympic Committee and the Big Plastic Pledge was launched, encouraging people to make three daily promises to reduce single-use plastics in their lives.