Hannah Mills interview: ‘Sport’s opportunity to spread climate change message is massive’

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