Toby Roberts (gold, men’s boulder & lead sport climbing)
Toby Roberts’ last New Year’s Eve is all a bit of a blur. It’s not that he was drinking – anything but – just that he was in the thick of such a hellish stretch of specialist winter training that the days have all blended into one. His father, and coach, Tristian, eventually reminds him that they spent most of it doing a strength session on a climbing board with a couple of friends. “Oh,” Toby says, not quite recalling. “Honestly, my New Year’s Eve is not that exciting. I just do my same old.”
Which for Roberts, means rock climbing. Back then, everything he was doing was specifically aimed at preparing for the men’s boulder and lead combined event at the Paris Olympics. “Obviously, I had to be very diligent in all sorts of ways, with my training, my sleep, my diet, just everything you can imagine. It was all driven towards Paris.” They spent the first half of the year travelling across continents, from Europe to Asia to the US, to work on the specific skills he would need for the courses they would face in the Olympics.
It paid off. Roberts won the gold when his main competitor fell during his final climb. “In that moment, when they fall in front of you and you’re watching on the stage, it’s quite hard because obviously you want to celebrate, but you also don’t want to make it look like you’re celebrating them falling off.”
Roberts is only 19, and he had invested so much time and energy in his ambition that there was a risk he would struggle afterwards. It is common for medal winners to be overcome by a sense of anticlimax. “But climbing is different, there’s so many different aspects to it that you’re never doing the same thing, so it never really feels like you can get bored of it,” he says. He took a short holiday, and then decided to get back into competition.
Roberts did a short tour of the media circuit, but he was soon back doing what he loves best, solving climbing problems. He has spent a lot of time in Spain this winter, working on one particular route in Margalef known as Mundo Perfecto. Only three men have ever completed it, because it involves an implausibly difficult finger-tip hold. “It wasn’t that I consciously started outdoor climbing, it was just a natural drive,” Roberts says. “It’s completely different. I love being outside.”
He’s happy there, out on the edge. “Competition climbing is absolutely great. I love it, but you never really feel like you’re finding your limit. Outdoor climbing is more of a personal challenge. And that’s why I think it is harder mentally. With outdoor climbing you’re trying to push your personal boundaries. This is challenging me in a different way, because it’s just so much harder than anything in the competitions, you need to really dig in deep to find a perfect performance.”
This New Year’s Eve, he’ll be with his coaches, again, only they won’t be working. “I’ll enjoy my New Year’s for once.” But his thoughts will be on the wall, and his next challenge. He has no doubt he wants to try to win another gold medal at the LA Olympics. “I want to try to go for as long as I possibly can, it’s one thing to do this when you’re young and fit and strong and healthy, but I think to manage getting older and to still be at this same level, that’s another on my list.”
Ben Proud (silver, men’s 50m freestyle swimming)
At the start of 2023, Ben Proud wasn’t sure he’d still be a competitive swimmer come the end of the year. He had finished fourth in the 50m freestyle at the Rio Olympics in 2016, and fifth in Tokyo in 2021, and just wasn’t sure he had another Games in him. “Every day I was putting so much pressure on myself,” he says, “and it left me in this really bad place afterwards, I felt this complete disconnect from the real world. The sport had taken so much away from me in terms of my relationships, and my time with family.” And for what?
Things started to change when Proud, 30, decided to travel back to Malaysia, where he first learned to swim, and met up with his first coach, Francis Kiu. “And 10 minutes after we had met, the stuff he was saying about my swimming and what we could do together just transformed my attitude. It was really, really special just to feel so much belief from someone who was there with me on day one of all this.” From there, Proud travelled to Hawaii, where he joined up with a swimming club run by the US coach Elliot Ptasnik.
Proud spent the next three weeks training with, and talking to, the former Olympic champions Aaron Peirsol and Anthony Ervin. Out there, in the surf, he rediscovered his love of the water. When it was over, he knew he wanted to go to Paris. So he moved to train in Turkey and set himself up with his own coaching regimen. When New Year’s Eve finally came around, he was completely fixated on the Games. “They were in my mind all the time, every idle minute. It’s not really something you can shake because all your day-to-day life is geared around it.”
Proud had planned his entire year around five races, two in qualifiers, three at the Games themselves. The margins are so small in his event that he couldn’t afford to make a single mistake in any of them. “Something as simple as a slight twitch on the block and everything’s over, everything you’ve been thinking about for three years is gone.” It happened in Tokyo, where his legs entered the water at the wrong angle, which he thinks cost him two-tenths of a second, the difference between fifth and second.
After Proud touched the wall in the final in Paris, he turned and was hit by the wash that was following him down the pool “and in that moment, right before the wave hit me, I saw my name on the board, and I saw I was second. Suddenly this great weight just lifted off my shoulders. I had an overwhelming feeling of relief.”
The hour after was one of the best of his life. “From touching the wall to going out to see my coaches to talking to the media to taking the medal, it was probably the first time in my career where I was actually able to stay present in the moment and take it all in.”
Now, Proud doesn’t know whether he will be at the next Olympics or not. But he is sure of himself, and his love for his sport. He is going to travel back to Malaysia, where he will run swimming clinics with the help of his old coach and his longtime sponsor Air Asia. “I might have a drink this New Year’s Eve,” he says. “I think my plan for the whole holiday period is just to catch up with all the people that I haven’t seen for so long. Making up for all that lost time is my new ambition.”
Emma Wilson (bronze, women’s IQFoil windsurfing)
Emma Wilson’s last new year resolution was the same as the one she had made the year before that, and the year before that, and every year running right back to 2012, when she first fell in love with the Olympics while watching Super Saturday of the London Games on TV. It was soon after that that she decided to go into windsurfing, just like her mother, who had competed in it at Barcelona 1992 and Atlanta 1996. “I’ve only ever had one dream,” Wilson says. She was out on the water on New Year’s Day, working to make it come true.
Wilson had won a bronze medal at the Tokyo Olympics. Afterwards, it took her three weeks to decide to try to win the gold in Paris. It wasn’t a straightforward choice, because World Sailing had announced that from that point on the windsurfers would be competing on foils rather than the flat boards they were used to, and for Wilson the transition felt almost as if she had to learn her sport all over again. “At first, there was a lot more crashing.”
It wasn’t the only difference. The federations decided that they would introduce a new race format, in which the medal places would be decided in one winner-takes-all final. It was a radical change in a sport which traditionally chooses a winner by tallying points over a series of races. “That’s how you’re taught when you grow up in the sport,” Wilson says. “It’s all about how you perform in the long run.”
Which is where Wilson comes into her own. At the world championships in February, Wilson was in the form of her life. By the end of the week, she had an unprecedented 62-point lead over the field. “It felt like a dream.” Then, in the final, she was given a five-second penalty at the start line, and ended up coming second. “In the moment I tried to be really positive about the format, like: ‘Well, this is what I signed up for.’”
Wilson carried that form into the Olympics. “I knew I’d done all the work I could possibly do, I was so calm, the only thing left to do was go race the course.” In the Games, she won eight of the preliminary races and had a 30-point lead. Any other year, she would have won the gold already. But not this one. In the final, Wilson picked the wrong racing line, and then everything went wrong. She ended up coming in third, again, for another bronze.
Wilson was absolutely shattered. In the immediate aftermath, she said she was going to quit the sport, because of the new format. “I was so upset on my board. I tried to compose myself before I came on to the beach but then, like, my whole team were there, and my family, and you suddenly realise: ‘It’s not just me, it’s everyone who has put in effort.’” She told the media that the winner-takes-all format was unfair on athletes. “It’s not OK to put people in this position.”
Wilson didn’t quit. She took a week’s holiday that turned into four weeks’ holiday, in Menorca, and spent the entire time kite surfing. It was the biggest break from the sport she had ever had. And when it was done, she realised she had “unfinished business” in the Olympics. “I don’t think I could stop now, no.” She has already decided to try again in Los Angeles.
“I don’t regret speaking out the way I did,” she says, “because it started a conversation.” World Sailing has announced it will revert to the old format. But she still finds Paris painful. “It was only a fortnight ago that I spoke about the medal race for the first time, because every time I tried before that, I just burst into tears.”
This New Year’s Eve, she says, will be a little different. “It’ll be more chill, I don’t think I’ll be training the next day.” But the new year resolution will be the same.
