Olympics 2024: The female stars going for gold from the West Midlands and Shropshire

Sophie Capewell

EVENT: Track cycling

HOPES: Medal hope

You could completely understand why, for Sophie Capewell, competing at Paris 2024 might feel like destiny.

The 25-year-old track sprinter was born into a cycling family, her father Nigel coaching at the local club in Lichfield and also competing in two Paralympics.

“I don’t think it was my parents’ intention to get us riding a bike, but we kind of couldn’t help it,” Capewell wrote this week on the British Cycling website.

“All our lives, we were surrounded by people riding bikes. The people dad coached were the people I looked up to. They were my inspiration.”

Capewell joined Lichfield Cycling Club as a youngster and tried out a variety of disciplines but always believed her future lay on the track.

First called up to the GB Olympic development squad aged 13, she won two medals at the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games and earlier this year became national champion for the second time.

In Paris she will compete alongside world individual champion Emma Finucane and Rio 2016 bronze medallist Katy Marchant in the team sprint, where they will be bidding to win GB’s first ever medal. After winning silver at the last two world championships, expectations were already high even before the trio won the Australian leg of this year’s World Cup. That represented the first gold medal for the GB women’s sprint squad since 2012 and they will head to Paris with the clear aim of finishing on the podium.

It is all a far cry from three years ago, when they failed to qualify for Tokyo. “We made a pact amongst all the girls on the squad a few years ago that we wanted to change the narrative,” explained Capewell earlier this year.

“We realised we weren’t going to qualify for Tokyo in the team sprint. We decided we didn’t want that to happen again.

“We didn’t want to be the squad that was having to find different avenues to qualify for an Olympics. We wanted to be a force.”

In that sense it is mission accomplished. Yet for Capewell, the story is tinged with sadness. Dad Nigel, who finished fourth at both the Atlanta 1996 and the Sydney 2000 Paralympics, died two years ago.

Capewell dedicated both of her medals in Birmingham to her father and says his words of advice and encouragement will still be loud in her ears when she takes to the track in Paris. “I feel really connected to my dad and it does feel I can share it with him in some strange way,” says Capewell.

“He left a bit of a legacy and he was a bit of a pioneer in the way he has approached things and I hope I can take that to the games with me. My dad always told me never to just aim for bronze because that’s what he did and he got fourth. He bred that into me so we are not aiming for third, let’s put it that way!

“We are just going to turn up and do the best we can. Yes there is pressure but there has always been pressure.”

Freya Anderson

EVENT: Swimming relay

HOPES: Medal prospect

Though 2024 might not have gone quite to plan for Freya Anderson, the Shropshire swimming star is still confident she can return from Paris with a medal or two.