It’s been seven months since Hannah Mills became the most successful female sailor in Olympic history, her gold medal in Tokyo adding to the one she picked up in Rio five years earlier and a silver from London 2012.
The Team GB logo on her face mask has almost faded but the sense of satisfaction in what she achieved on the waters off Enoshima most certainly has not.
“Tokyo’s definitely the Olympics that I’m most proud of,” she tells Standard Sport. “In terms of my performance as an athlete, I definitely delivered the best performance I ever have.
“It’s cool to look back on,” she adds, though at the time she was open about the extent to which nerves and - after an extended cycle - anticipation troubled her across the course of the regatta.
“I wouldn’t say I didn’t enjoy it, but for sure, you wake up every day feeling sick,” she says. “You struggle to eat your breakfast but the competition and that feeling is what drives you as an athlete.
“It’s such a privilege to experience that - it’s something that’s so important to you on that big a scale that it invokes those feelings. Knowing you’ve been able to overcome all of that and still deliver your best performance is just really cool.”
Mills is talking in San Francisco, where she is part of a British team skippered by Sir Ben Ainslie preparing for the grand final of Sail GP this weekend.
The sport’s elite global circuit, akin to Formula 1’s, is barely recognisable in comparison to the 470 class in which Mills plied her Olympic trade, the teams racing in high-tech F50 catamarans which appear to fly over the water as much as cut through it, travelling at four times the speed.
Having retired from Olympic sailing immediately after Tokyo, Mills answered a call from Ainslie to join his crew, becoming part of the first crop of women to compete in the league in Cadiz last year.
“Every team’s got at least one woman and next season we’re going to have three involved,” says Mills, whose Olympic discipline will become a mixed gender event from Paris 2024. “We’re just trying to build momentum and in my mind we’re working towards gender equity on the boats.
“There aren’t many sports that could do something like that at the pinnacle. It’s such an opportunity - we could be groundbreaking.”
Britain come into the weekend. in sixth place in the standings, with only an outside chance of qualifying for Sunday’s winner-takes-all finale.
They are, however, firmly in contention for Sail GP’s other prize, currently ranked second in its Impact League, which charts each team’s efforts to make their existence as sustainable as possible, with metrics ranging from the food waste they produce during race week to the causes they promote. The winner of the first-of-its-kind competition receives a $100,000 grant to donate to their chosen environmental partner.
“We’ve got a podium on the water and a podium for the planet,” Mills says, and none of this is lip service when it comes to an athlete who is a long-time advocate for positive climate action, one who used her press conference in Tokyo after winning gold alongside Eilidh McIntyre as the stage for an impassioned appeal to protect the world’s oceans.
She admits there is something of an elephant in the room when it comes to pushing sustainability through a league that flies its athletes to meetings as far afield as Sydney and Bermuda across the course of a season.
“It’s a tricky one and I do often feel pretty bad about it,” she says, but finds justification in the platform the rapidly-growing series is providing.
“The opportunity we have to make positive change by competing globally and going to these different countries to talk about the impact of climate change around the world, engaging with communities and sharing knowledge, is so massive.
“We wouldn’t be able to do that without being connected in person, it’s just not as productive.”
Sailing’s inextricable ties to the ocean mean such activism comes naturally to many of its elite competitors, but Mills feels a degree of frustration that the coffee is not being smelt more broadly.
“You see so many sports that are getting impacted already,” she adds. “Cricket’s one with flooding, golf losing courses with coastal erosion, tennis with the heat in Australia. It’s everywhere, across so many sports. It shouldn’t take that for people to act but sometimes it does.”
This week Mills and Ainslie helped launch the British team’s new Protect Our Future initiative, a climate education project with a goal of reaching more than a million young people. As far as sport is concerned, Mills believes the key lies in similar empowerment of athletes in fields with a far greater reach than sailing.
“A lot of athletes are worried about some aspects of it - not being an expert, being hypocritical because we do have to fly around the world to do what we do,” she explains.
“For me, yes individually we need to reduce our impact as much as we can and educate ourselves but the opportunity we have as a sport and as athletes to spread positive messages, make changes, be impactful, is huge. You imagine football - its reach is half the world’s population, it’s absolutely massive.”
You can almost see the cogs whirring when Mills is asked which podium she would rather top - the one for planet or performance - and eventually, torn, she politely abstains.
Her Olympic days may be done, but she is still determined to be a champion in more ways than one.
