4 March 2021
One year till Beijing 2022: Chef de Mission's blog
by Phil Smith
On Saturday 8 March 2014, I sat in the stands of the Rosa Khutor Alpine Resort in Sochi and watched my first ever live Winter Paralympic action as part of the ParalympicsGB core staff. It was only 18 months after the amazing success of London 2012 and for the first time Channel 4 were there showing wall to wall coverage. London changed the Paralympic Games forever, but were our Winter athletes going to be able to ride the crest of that wave?
I was nervous sitting there because I knew that we didn’t have a brilliant record at the Winter Games. In fact ParalympicsGB had won just one medal at the Winter Games since 1994. Within 20 minutes of Sochi starting we’d matched the medal haul of the previous 20 years thanks to Jade Etherington and Caroline Powell’s silver medal in the Downhill. For the first time ever ParalympicsGB were front page news at a Winter Games and I was hooked.
The team won six medals in Sochi including the first ever gold medal on snow by a British athlete at either the Paralympic or Olympic Games. I’ve been lucky enough to work at five Paralympic Games but high fiving Kelly Gallagher and Charlotte Evans at the bottom of that ski slope is one of my most cherished memories, although Aileen Nielson skipping our Wheelchair Curlers to a bronze medal after a nerve-wracking week on the ice certainly pushed it close!
Come on Aileen: ParalympicsGB curlers celebrate Sochi bronze
Four years later in PyeongChang saw the team cement themselves as a force to be reckoned with at the Winter Games thanks to medal success on the slopes from Menna Fitzpatrick, Jen Kehoe, Millie Knight and Brett Wild. I’ll never forget dancing with our Korean volunteers in the team office when we won gold and bronze on the final day of the Games, but the biggest success story in PyeongChang might just have been the number of sports that we were represented in. As well as the Alpine Skiers and Wheelchair Curlers, we made our debut in Snowboard and Scott Meenagh became our first Nordic Skier in 20 years. All of a sudden we weren’t just winning medals but the groundwork for future success was falling into place.
Phil and Millie Knight in PyeongChang
Today marks a year to go until Beijing 2022 and normally by now we’d be reflecting on the success of our summer team whilst eagerly looking forward to watching our Winter athletes in action. Well, we all know things haven’t quite worked out like that over the last year and so whilst we still have the small matter of Tokyo 2020 to come this summer, that’s no reason not to get excited about our winter team too. Building on the success of Sochi and PyeongChang we now have genuine medal contenders in Alpine Skiing, Nordic Skiing, Snowboard and Wheelchair Curling and I cannot wait to see what this team can achieve in Beijing.
A year ago today was the proudest moment of my career when I was announced as Chef de Mission for the ParalympicsGB team in Beijing and I’ve spent the time since in complete awe of the determination, ambition and resilience of all of our athletes and staff to be ready for the Games despite all the challenges that have been thrown at them. The team at ParalympicsGB is constantly motivated to do everything we can to be equally ready because we know that the pride we feel every day working with this team will be felt across the nation on the 4 March 2022.
Beijing promises to be a coming together of people from all around the world after far too long when we haven’t been able to do just that. But it will also be an opportunity for the best athletes in the world to show what they can do.
The Brits will be there, we’ll be ready and we’ll be Impossible To Ignore.
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