How To Be An Olympian

How to be an Olympian is about hope. 

More prosaically perhaps, it’s about rower Jess Leyden and cyclist Hannah Dines, two women who represent Great Britain's Olympic and Paralympic present and future, and their journeys between Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020.

It’s the Olympic story of Jess, an age-group world champion and senior world medallist. It’s about how she missed out on Rio by a matter of seconds, then got back in the same boat and dragged it through a season of turmoil to world championships bronze. It’s about training camps and cut-throat trials, and – for now at least, because it all depends on where the coaches want to put you – it’s about everything that comes with being four women in a boat.

It’s the Paralympic story of Hannah, who went to Rio three years after seeing her first racing trike and two years after seeing her second, and managed to pull her own round to a pair of fifth places in the time trial and the road race. It’s about how she was dropped by British Cycling, suffered health scares and self-doubt, scraped together funding from wherever she could, and battled her way back into contention on her own terms.

Training sessions and races, setbacks and breakthroughs, injuries and bust-ups, it’s all here, and don’t ask us how it’s all going to end, because we couldn’t tell you. But then, isn’t that the beauty of it? In a world in which the difference between success and failure can be as insubstantial as the tread of a tyre or the ebb of a bow ball, it’s about what you can’t control as much as what you can, and at any moment, it could all come crashing down. And that, as much as anything else, is why they do it.

And so How to be an Olympian isn’t really about winning, even when they do, and it isn’t really about glory, even if that comes. It’s about what it’s really like to dedicate the best years of your life to the uncertainty of a moment. 

It’s a story about hope.