At just four years old, Grace Reid was already obsessed with diving.
It’s at this tender age from which Reid’s first Olympic memories stem; she was on a family holiday in Mallorca and instead of playing on the beach like a typical four-year-old, she was holed up in her hotel room watching every minute of the women’s diving competition at the Sydney Olympics .
Such levels of dedication to watching may not have made for the perfect family holiday but it ignited the spark that has led to Reid becoming a three-time Olympian.
Paris 2024 will be the 28-year-old from Edinburgh’s third Olympic outing having competed at both Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 but this one does, admits Reid, feel particularly distinct.
“Paris is a very special place for me on a personal level and the journey that I’ve been on from the last Olympics to this one makes it so much sweeter,” she says.
“Every Games I’ve been to feels incredibly special but this one feels like a particularly huge moment in my career and my life.”
The journey to which Reid refers is her hitting rock bottom following Tokyo 2020.
Following a disappointing, by her standards, performance in Tokyo, Reid realised she was no longer enjoying the sport she’d spent her entire life immersed in and she was ready to hang up her swimsuit for good.
However, after tentatively venturing back to the pool following a post-Olympic holiday, Reid rediscovered her love for diving and that has led to her shifting her approach to the sport, which in turn has allowed her to rediscover the kind of form that saw her win Commonwealth and European titles earlier in her career.
“I don’t think I could sum everything I’ve been through into a couple of lessons, it’s not that clear. It’s more where I’m at in my life now and how I feel about myself out of the pool,” she says.
“I now realise that me being a good person isn’t dependent on how I do in the diving pool. That’s given me the freedom to relax in competitions and that’s when I do my best diving.”
Reid, who is the lone Scot in the GB diving team for the 2024 Olympic Games and will contest the 3m springboard event in Paris, has been in good form this season, with a silver medal in the 1m springboard event at the World Championships in February proof that she still has the capability to compete with the world’s best.
And her recent success has taught her that a good performance is about turning off her brain, as far as is possible.
“The biggest thing for me to make sure I dive well is about doing all of the hard work before Paris so that on competition day, I’m on autopilot,” she says.
“That’s so important because in diving, which is so technical and where the margins are so fine, the less thinking you do, the better.
“During a dive, you’re making micro-adjustments but in terms of conscious thinking, you don’t want to be doing too much of that.”
Having collected World, Commonwealth and European silverware in an international career that began at the Commonwealth Games in 2010 when Reid was just 14 years old, the Scot admits she is aware that there is one medal missing from her collection.
And while an Olympic medal is typically the trickiest for any athlete to get their hands on, Reid admits she has pondered the possibility of completing the set before she ends her career.
“In an ideal world, you’d tick all the boxes and complete the full set of medals and then you’d walk away happy but sport isn’t always like that,” she says.
“It’s a really tough field in my event but I do like to daydream about winning an Olympic medal and I’m doing everything I can to put myself in a position where that’d be possible.
“I’ve got five really strong dives so there’s no reason why I can’t do well in Paris.”
