Telford's golden guide Luke Pollard achieves more success with Dave Ellis

The Telford native serves as a guide for the visually-impaired Ellis, completing every part of the swim, bike, run alongside him.

The pair emerged from the swim only 18 seconds down on the leaders, having started three minutes and 31 seconds back with start times staggered based on level of impairment.

The swim time became all the more impressive as Pollard revealed what had happened underneath the surface of the Seine.

“Dave smashed me in the mouth about 20m in which didn’t help,” joked Pollard, who is one of more than 1,000 elite athletes on UK Sport’s National Lottery-funded World Class Programme, allowing them to train full time, have access to the world’s best coaches and benefit from pioneering medical support – which has been vital on their pathway to the Paris 2024 Games.

“But trying to keep Dave all the way on the right without chucking him into the side was difficult but he’s an extremely- skilled athlete and such a great swimmer so he used his skills.”

Ellis is a former Paralympic swimmer, transitioning to triathlon before Rio 2016 where his category was not included.

Pollard became his guide in 2019, and the pair have had unparalleled success since then, but the Paralympic gold was the last prize missing from their collection.

A mechanical problem on the bike leg in Tokyo ended their hopes as they failed to finish and meant that Pollard, an experienced cyclist, had worked hard to avoid a repeat.

He added: “I think I’ve spent about three years sorting that bike so it’s pretty much bulletproof, so we obviously did a test event last year that gave us a lot of confidence.

“We ran lower pressures on the tyres this year than we did last year, we have worked with our wheel sponsors going through a load of stuff with us like wheel pressures and that helped us with vibrations and things like that.”

The pair had moved into the lead on the bike course before being overhauled heading into transition.

The duo matched each other with their laidback approach so did not panic and delivered a 16:18 split in the 5k run to storm to gold by more than a minute.

For Pollard, it is now about whether he can keep up with Ellis as they already look to 2028.

“Dave is the hardest-working bloke I know,” he said. “And it’s an absolute pleasure to work with him every day. It’s what gets me up every morning. In the winter when it’s freezing cold I just feed off his energy.

“If I can, if I’m fast enough, yes, I’d love to work with Dave for LA.”

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