Hours upon hours in training centres, nauseatingly early starts, the euphoria of success and the heartbreak when it goes wrong; it’s hard work being the parent of an Olympic athlete. Sure, the gymnasts, hurdlers and divers put in the most obvious graft — but with athletes usually hitting their peak in their twenties, you don’t get to the Olympic Games without significant support during your adolescence. For most people this means leaning emotionally, logistically and financially on Mum and Dad.
Take Lauren Williams, for example, who won silver in the taekwondo last week. When she joined the GB team aged 14, she was summoned from south Wales to Manchester to train — yet she was too young to live in the athletes’ accommodation. To make it work, her mother had to relocate with her to a caravan near Rochdale, leaving her father and sister at home. “If a child can be given a chance, who are we to deny them?” her dad, Allan, told the press.
Tom Daley’s father, who died in 2011, proudly used to call himself “Taxi Dad”: he clocked up over 100,000 miles driving his son to diving competitions and training. One imagines that he would be thrilled but not surprised to learn that Daley is now a gold medallist. Adam Peaty, who won two golds and a silver for his swimming, owes something not just to his parents but to his wider community: in his home town of Uttoxeter in Staffordshire, family friends organised raffles and tombolas to pay for his competition kit.
The 30-year-old equestrian Tom McEwen returns from Tokyo with a gold medal for the team three-day eventing, and silver for the individual eventing. Getting him to world-class level, explains his mother, Ali McEwen, has been “very much a family affair”, with his grandfather ferrying him between school and the trainer. There’s been financial savviness required too: “Usually to buy a good young horse, you’re talking £20,000 to £30,000. We’re not a moneyed family, so it was always borrowing, being given, and trying to produce good horses and ponies from babies.”
McEwen had been a showjumper herself, so she knew what they were getting into with Tom — but that’s not the case for every Olympic parent.
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“There was no athletic background, no family history for us at all, until along came the little one,” says Simon Richards. By “little one”, he means his son — the 6ft 2in, 18-year-old swimmer Matt Richards, who won gold in the 4 x 200m freestyle relay for Team GB last week. Simon and his wife, Amanda, speak to me a few days after this triumph, via Zoom from their home in Droitwich; behind them are three framed photos of Matt as a child, strung with Union Jack bunting, and Amanda’s nails are also painted with tiny flags. The couple are so proud they look as though they might float away. “This week has been absolutely crackers,” Amanda says. “It has been the most surreal experience of my life.”
As a promising ten-year-old, Matt was doing a few hours of swimming a week, but by the time he was 12 it was five nights a week, plus a morning or two before school. Soon Matt was outgrowing the facilities at Worcester swimming club, so his parents agreed to send him as a weekly boarder to the Royal School Wolverhampton, where there’s an elite swimming programme.
Matt has no siblings – the couple had hoped for more children, but weren’t able to have them – so to wave him off for the bulk of the week was painful. “It was one of the hardest decisions we’ve ever had to make,” Amanda says. “You have to give up your baby and miss out on a lot of his growing up. I’d cry all the way home on a Sunday.”
Although the school is free, the Richardses spent about £10,000 a year on boarding fees so Matt could put in hours at the pool without losing sleep or study time. “It was like another mortgage and it was a big stretch for us — it meant we didn’t have holidays and didn’t do any decorating, and the house fell apart around our ears,” says his mother. “But it was well worth it.”
In the summer holidays, school took a break, but Matt’s swimming continued. “I had to get up at half past three every morning and drive him to Wolverhampton and back for training, then do it again in the afternoon.”
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Once athletes rise up the ranks, sponsorship and grants can start to cover the cost of competing, but until then, elite sport is a very expensive business.
In equestrianism in particular, there’s a reason why world-class athletes have often been from wealthy families: “The expenses include purchasing the horse, keeping the horse, competition entries, which are extortionate now, travelling and tuition,” McEwen says.
Even on a more mundane level, athletes are expensive to keep. Andrew Guy, the father of Matt’s gold-medallist team-mate James Guy, said that his son consumes 9,000 calories a day, including plenty of fish and chicken, and that their supermarket bills are enormous.
“With swimmers, when they’re young in particular, you’ve got to traipse all around the country, and every meet you go to, you’ve got to pay entry fees. Then the kids start racing, and a pair of the swimming skins that they need are £250, £300 a pop,”
Amanda says. “You see so many parents at a meet who are practically in tears, because their daughter’s just put her nails through a swimming kit and they’ve got to find another one.”
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There’s a difference, of course, between helping your teenager to succeed in something they love, and becoming unhealthily obsessed with that success. In his 2009 memoir, the former world No 1 tennis player Andre Agassi wrote of his dad’s merciless coaching style: “Nothing sends my father into a rage like hitting a ball into the net. He foams at the mouth.” The Richardses are keen to point out that to raise a healthy and successful athlete, you need to be supportive, not pushy, and let the child’s natural enthusiasm lead the way. The other essential, they believe, is teaching your child that they can bounce back from failure. “That’s the key to athletes achieving well — it’s having that ability to not let it knock you.”
When a child does scoop a medal, a parent’s efforts are rewarded with profound pride and relief. David Morgan, the father of the bronze-winning gymnast Amelie Morgan, has described it as “a joy that was unmatched”. A video of Tom Dean’s mother Jacquie Hughes celebrating her swimmer son’s 200m freestyle gold with friends and family in Team Tom T-shirts went viral last week — no wonder. She had spent years being a “swimming mum” to her five children, who she would drive to the pool in the family’s battered van five mornings a week, the day starting at 5.10am. “I’d say, ‘This is your first call,’ and then I’d put the kettle on and get some pastries out,” she told this paper at the weekend.
Tom McEwen’s parents watched his events alongside their friends from the stables. “If you’d have heard the utter thrill from everybody,” says his mum. “When you work this hard on a very dangerous sport, you’re all quite close-knit. It’s just amazing to have achieved something like that. It makes it all worthwhile — all the years of freezing cold early mornings.”
