Three years ago Georgia Mae Fenton feared her lifelong dream of becoming an Olympian had ebbed away in a lonely Tokyo hotel room while her history-making team-mates soaked up the acclaim on centre-stage.
Fenton was all kitted out for the big occasion but as travelling first reserve for the GB women’s gymnastics team, she was denied access to the Olympic Village, forced to contend with a further degree of separation at a Games already ravaged by Covid restrictions.
Mixed emotions inevitably greeted the sight of her friends and team-mates confounding expectations by clinching the nation’s first women’s team medal in 93 years, but Fenton, now 23, emerged from the experience doubly determined not to be a bit-part player again in Paris.
Fenton got her wish, as she was named on Thursday in the five-strong women’s team for next month’s Games in the French capital, along with Alice Kinsella, the only surviving member of the 2020 bronze medal-winning squad, veteran Becky Downie and fellow Olympic debutants Ruby Evans and Abigail Martin.
“When I got the call asking me to be reserve for Tokyo, my first reaction was that I didn’t want to do it,” Fenton, a three-time Commonwealth Games gold medallist, recalled to the PA news agency.
“It’s the worst situation to be in. You go through the whole of the Olympic build-up, then kitting-out with the team, but when you get to the Games you have to stay in a different hotel and you don’t really join in the celebrations.
“But I didn’t know if I’d get a chance again, and I didn’t want to look back and think that I’d just given up. Being reserve was really tough but I’m glad I did it, because it was character building. It taught me a lot about myself, and it inspired me to stay on and reach the point I’m at today.”
Fenton returned from Tokyo to retain her Commonwealth title on the uneven bars in Birmingham and was also a part of the women’s team that won a world silver medal in Liverpool the following year.
But the team’s chances of repeating their remarkable performance in Tokyo has been undermined by high-profile injuries to arguably their best two athletes, reigning world floor champion Jessica Gadirova and emerging talent Ondine Achampong, both of whom suffered torn ACLs.
“Ondine is my best friend and she has been a rock for me, and hopefully I have been a rock for her too,” added Fenton.
“We wanted to experience this together and I know her time will come. We have achieved great things as a group and the injuries have been pretty awful.”
Triple gold medallist Max Whitlock leads a five-strong men’s team that also includes Jake Jarman, the reigning world champion on vault, Joe Fraser, a former world champion on parallel bars, plus debutants Harry Hepworth and Luke Whitehouse.
Whitlock stepped away from the sport after clinching his second-straight pommel crown in Tokyo in 2021 but returned last year and recently announced he would make the 2024 Games his last.
Two-time Olympic medallist Bryony Page will bid to add an elusive gold medal to her collection and she will be joined in a three-strong trampoline team by debutants Izzy Songhurst and Zak Perzamanos.
Performance director Tracy Whittaker-Smith said: “With first Games debutantes alongside established Olympic greats like Max Whitlock OBE and Bryony Page, we feel we have a fantastic mix of athletes, all of whom have achieved major championship medal success this cycle.
“We head to the Games with medal ambitions across the board and more than that, with the aim to unite the gymnastics community in a celebration of our incredible sport with these inspirational Olympic role models at the heart of that.”
