Eilidh McIntyre: Olympic gold medallist retires from sailing ahead of Paris 2024 at age of 28
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Published 21/02/2023 at 12:11 GMT
Eilidh McIntyre will not be defending her gold medal at Paris 2024. The 28-year-old, who won the women's 470 event at Tokyo 2020 alongside team-mate Hannah Mills, has announced she will be retiring from sailing. McIntyre has been training with new team-mate Martin Wrigley in preparation for the next Olympics, but says she doesn't think they would have been challenging for gold.
Eilidh McIntyre
Image credit: Getty Images
Olympic gold medallist Eilidh McIntyre has announced her retirement from sailing.
McIntyre, 28, won gold in the women's 470 event at Tokyo 2020, alongside team-mate Hannah Mills.
Mills retired shortly after Tokyo, but McIntyre had planned to continue and go again at Paris 2024 until “losing belief in the cause”.
She told Team GB: “I want to go to another Olympics and I want to challenge for another medal, but I only want to go if I’m going to be battling it out for gold.
“I don’t want to go and be in that final race of the Olympics absolutely nowhere near to getting a medal. These things happen at the Olympics and you can’t control it.
"But I, in my heart, just don’t believe that in the time frame available to us that we are going to be in a situation to battle it out for a medal and for a gold.
"I just lost belief in that cause. I don’t want to go to the Games for the t-shirt.”
McIntyre, who was made an MBE last year, has been training with new team-mate Martin Wrigley after it was announced the 470 events at the next Olympics would be mixed-gender.
However, McIntyre says the quicker turnaround, after the last Olympics were delayed by a year, made preparing for Paris more difficult.
“A lot of people have said ‘it’s only three years, you can make that’. That actually makes it harder,” she said.
"I had five years to build the team for Tokyo and get it into the right place. The great thing about the five years was that we came away with the gold medal but the knock-on was that there were only three this cycle.
“I tried to take an easy year but it wasn’t really an easy year and it’s actually been a bit of a mess.
“The knock-on of that has been quite hard. I know other people have done it really successfully but I’ve found it challenging to come off the back of that.”
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The Olympic Games will return with Paris 2024, live on Eurosport and discovery+, the Eurosport app and at eurosport.com
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