An encounter with one of your sporting heroes is always bound to be inspiring for a young athlete.
And this was certainly the case for Britain’s Hannah Mills, who would go on to become the most successful female Olympian in sailing history after a fateful meeting with the legendary Sir Ben Ainslie.
Ainslie is one the sport’s most recognisable figures, with his unrivalled record of five medals across five Games campaigns making him the Olympics’ most decorated sailor.
His first silverware came at Atlanta 1996, where he brought home silver in the Laser class, before his era of dominance began, winning a gold medal in each of his next four Olympics.
And for Mills, who started sailing as an eight-year old, it was a childhood encounter with the all-time great after his Atlanta display which set her on the path to huge success of her own.
The 36-year-old, fresh from the fourth season of SailGP, the international F50 catamaran racing competition in which she now competes, told talkSPORT.com about her introduction to the legendary figure.
She recalled: “My first experience of seeing Ben was at an Optimist event when I was 11 years old, where he came and did a Q&A.
“He’d just come back from Atlanta where he’d got a silver medal, it was a few years after that.
“To be honest, at the time, I didn’t really know anything about sailing in the Olympics. My family weren’t sailors. I’d watched the Atlanta Olympics as an eight-year-old and [was] just blown away, but I hadn’t watched any sailing.”
It was this brush with sporting royalty that made Mills seriously consider a career in sailing.
She said: “That was the moment that I was like: ‘Oh my God, sailing is in the Olympics, that’s what I want to do. I want to go to the Olympics and I want it to be in a sailing boat’.”
Mills’ dream became a reality when she made her Olympic debut at London 2012, winning a silver medal for Team GB in the women’s 470 event alongside Saskia Clark.
The memorable summer of sport was made even more special by the fact that was joined by Ainslie in the British team.
The Cardiff-born sailor said: “Then go on 12 years or so [from their first meeting], and I was in an Olympic team with him going to London, which was my first games and his last games.”
“There was such a divide in that Olympic team, actually, in terms of experience. There was the new era of sailors, which was myself and a couple of others. And then there were the old guards.”
And Mills credits Ainslie, among others, for making her believe she could succeed at the home Games.
She explained: “As a young sailor in that environment, it was such a cool place to be because we had so many people to watch and learn from, and ask questions from.”
“I think there was just a real sense of control of like: ‘We’re here, we’re at the Olympics, it’s a home Games, but we’ve got this, because look at all these people we’re surrounded by who’ve done it before, and know how to win’.
“And obviously Ben was a big part of that.”
And Mills’ work with her hero did not stop after London 2012.
After retiring from Olympic sailing in 2021 with successive golds at Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020, she joined Ainslie’s SailGP team Emirates Great Britain as its first female sailor in the same year, where she now spearheads the competition’s Women’s Pathway Programme.
The Pathway has made huge strides in driving gender equity, with SailGP holding a first ever all-female training session in Dubai in December 2023, which saw its female athletes train in new positions on board the F50 boat.
In August 2022, Mills and Ainslie set up the Athena Pathway Programme, which aims to fast track development in high-performance sailing and bring diversity into the sport.
Mills highlighted some of its successes in recent years: “We have the Women’s America’s Cup [a first for sailing, beginning in September], which is creating a huge pool of amazing female sailors that are getting so much more experience now sailing these boats.
“We’ve got 12 nations competing for women in each boat. So we’ve got 48 women that have suddenly tons more experience, which is massive.”
She also pointed to the role of the Athena Pathway in increasing diversity within SailGP, having partnered up with London secondary school Greig City Academy, which has a sailing programme of its own, to provide their sailors with a route into the competition.
Mills explained: “We identified a couple of those sailors. And we’ve brought one of them on actually for a full, year long apprenticeship-type opportunity where he’s joined our SailGP team on the shore side.
“He’s also got a program to basically just get as good as he can at grinding, which is what you do at the front of a SailGP boat.
“And then he’s going to have a trial hopefully in Dubai on the boat to see where he’s at.”
Fans will be able to watch Hannah Mills back in action for Team Emirates GBR in Season 5 of SailGP, which starts in November
News Summary:
- Childhood meeting with Olympics legend inspired Hannah Mills to write her name into Team GB history
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