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Hannah Mills: ‘I don’t wake up thinking about making sailing history in Tokyo’


After the Rio Olympics, Hannah Mills tried retirement out to see what it felt like. “I knew that Saskia was going to retire,” the 31-year-old says of her long-time sailing partner, Saskia Clark, whom she competed with at two Games and won first silver then gold in the 470 dinghy class, “but for me the path wasn’t clear. It was all up in the air, and I hadn’t had anything organised. I just wanted to have focus, have something else to do to look forward to and experience.”

So Mills took a room at her brother’s house and some work experience at the activity clothing company Musto. “It was a precaution”, she says. “I knew how empty I’d felt after London in terms of having such an incredible buildup, an amazing experience but then it just suddenly ends. It’s actually hard; it’s really, really hard. Like anything you’ve been building up to in life it’s really exciting and then you just feel empty and a bit lost. So win or lose in Rio I wanted to make sure I had got some things planned, regardless of whether I was sailing again.”

Mills enjoyed the change, learned a lot, but now she is back in the boat. The call of the sport to which she has dedicated her life proved too much. She also has a new partner, Eilidh McIntyre, and, after a summer in which they became world champions on the Olympic waters of Enoshima Harbour, the pair will represent Great Britain in Tokyo next year.

“To get selected for the Olympic team is a huge achievement and to do it again, with a new partner, is just so special,” Mills says. “Eilidh and I have been sailing together for coming up to two years now and we’ve had to work on a lot of stuff. But we had an amazing summer out in Japan. We won the worlds on the Olympic waters. We know that everyone turned up to that event with their game faces on. It was a really, really tight contest between us and the Japanese girls and we were learning off them as much as we possibly could.”

Knowledge of the waters, and the meteorological conditions around them, are invaluable for sailors going into competition. But knowledge comes at a price. “It certainly threw up some challenges we weren’t expecting,” Mills says of her summer in Japan. “I think we underanticipated the heat out there. Our competitions are seven or eight days long and we’re out in the hottest part of the day on the water. We got a little bit of a breeze, but there’s no let up and there’s no protection. It’s just a war of attrition and [in those conditions] it’s brutal, it’s absolutely brutal. Also, because of the humidity, my hands just fell apart. I had blisters all over them. Pulling ropes and sailing the boat well was a challenge in itself.”

Both the trial retirement and those hard-won learnings from Tokyo cast light on Mills’ talents. She says her experience has made her more big picture-oriented, her priorities now are about doing everything right, at the right time. But she also admits to spending much of the summer working with McIntyre on refining their onboard communication, shaving off as many syllables as possible so that complicated processes can be articulated immediately and over deafening noise. She has not given up on the details yet, then, and that is one of the reasons why – should she retain the gold she won with Clark in Rio – Mills will become the most successful British female sailor in the history of the Games.

“It’s a funny one because it’s certainly not something that’s driving me to perform next year,” says Mills of her potential place in the record books. “I don’t wake up thinking about it. As I have got older, I’ve really tried to enjoy the journey of the Olympic Games. That’s something Eilidh and I have put a lot of effort into, making sure that we enjoy the whole process.

“Obviously we go there to win and will do everything in our power to win but there’s no guarantees at the Games. If we can deliver our best performance and that’s not good enough because of whatever factors we still have to be proud of everything we put into it, and know that we’ve not left anything in the bank.”

And after that, perhaps, it will be retirement for real? “I will be more seriously thinking about retiring after Tokyo”, she says. “I’m putting quite a lot of stuff in place at the moment. Hopefully I will have a few goals, new challenges, to take on.”



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