Across the Olympics and Paralympics taking place between July and September 2021, Sheffield is proud to throw its support behind our incredible athletes, all of whom have balanced the demands of training to compete at the highest level while also studying for a degree at the University.
Alumna Hollie Pearne-Webb, MBE (BA Economics 2013) will be aiming to repeat her performance in Rio in 2016, where she won a gold medal with the Team GB Women’s Hockey team after scoring the winning penalty in the final shoot out. In Tokyo, Hollie will be stepping up and captaining the side.
Bryony Page (BSc Biology 2015) will be hoping to go one step further than she did in Rio, where she became the first British trampolinist to win an Olympic medal, taking home silver.
David Wetherill (BSc Biological Chemistry 2012) is returning to compete in the Paralympic Table Tennis. Tokyo will mark David’s fourth Paralympics. He hopes to continue the winning form he showed at the 2019 European Paralympic Table Tennis Championships, where he won Team Gold and Class Six Singles Bronze, just a month after undergoing heart surgery.
Current student Megan Shackleton (English Literature) will be joining David to compete in the Paralympic Table Tennis. This will be Megan’s first Paralympics appearance. We are hoping for great things following her bronze medals at the 2020 Spanish Open, and the 2019 European Championship.
The British Wheelchair Basketball organisation has its training centre based in Sheffield at the English Institute of Sport (EIS), where another Olympic medal winning alumna was based - Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill (BSc Psychology 2007) - and our two competitors will hope that some of her luck will have rubbed off on them.
Joy Haizelden (BMedSci Health and Human Sciences 2020) and Lucy Robinson (Molecular Biology student) will both be representing Team GB in the wheelchair basketball competition. Joy competed at the Rio 2016 Paralympics and helped the side to a fourth place finish, the highest achieved by the Team GB Women’s team, while Lucy will be making her Paralympic debut.
We hope you’ll join us in cheering them on and wishing them all the best from Sheffield!
Supporting Sheffield’s elite athletes
The Elite Sports Performance Scheme (ESPS) has played a major part in supporting elite athletes at the University of Sheffield for many years, including all six of our Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls in Tokyo.
The programme supported athletes such as Hollie Pearne-Webb, David Wetherill and Bryony Page, and in more recent years, particularly with the GB Wheelchair Basketball hub at the EIS, it has offered integral support to Joy Haizelden and Lucy Robinson of the GB team, plus Con Nagle and Sara Millband from the GB Wheelchair Basketball performance pathway.
In the upcoming 2021/22 academic year there are another eight ESPS athletes supported by £1,000 grant awards, taking the total to over 50 athletes in the past six years. This enables student athletes to support their sport and studies, with many utilising this funding to pay for travel, accommodation and equipment. Not to mention the other 200 plus athletes aided in other ways through the scheme.