We caught up with Chris and Gabby Adcock to talk about all things Chiristmas, as they prepare their holiday training for the All England Championships in March.
So what's Christmas like for two elite athletes?
Gabby - “Eating lots of food, my mum normally cooks a really nice Christmas turkey dinner. We open our presents and watch my little brother open his presents and that’s amazing! Really just chilling out and doing nothing!
“We are up in Leeds this year at my mum’s; we usually alternate it.”
Gabby - “We open presents one by one; we don’t like doing it altogether – it lasts longer that way!”
Chris – “We normally play a game of some sort. Articulate usually ends up in an argument between someone in the family! It gets very competitive between us athletes.”
Gabby – “It’s quite funny to wind my mum up with Articulate, we always say she’s cheating and then she goes off on one!”
Gabby – “My mum is cooking this year. We don’t usually host for Christmas but saying that, I did cook a really good beef roast dinner at the weekend which was amazing so I think I might invite people down next year! I just need a few more practices and I’ll be beating my mum!”
“We have a dishwasher!”
“Normally we set a budget and then say we will surprise each other; we are both pretty good present buyers!”
Gabby –“Family time. Everyone getting together; I’m going to see all my sisters at once which is a real nice treat. I love getting all cosy by the fire and having nice quality, family time.”
Chris – “Christmas dinner and mince pies for me!! Mince pies are just amazing; you can never have enough of them!”
Gabby – “Home Alone! I love that film. I’ve always liked all the films since I was a kid so yep for me, Home Alone.”
Chris – “I’m not too sure. I think I would say Home Alone too – I watched it the other day! I used to love The Snowman as a kid so whenever that comes on that reminds me of Christmas.”
Gabby – “Mariah Carey – All I want for Christmas”
Chris – “Too many to choose from, I like a lot of them!”
Gabby – “Waking up as a kid and having piles of presents, waking my mum and dad up at five in the morning and them saying, ‘go back to bed for another hour!’ That and building snowmen- in fact I made a great one last year that we dressed in an Adcocks t-shirt, racket and a shuttlecock as its nose! We had a badminton snowman!”
Gabby – “Yes, we are going into the physically phase so we are going to want to keep that up and not lose it all. We won’t be so much on court but we will keep the physical side of it up.”
Chris – “I think we always have one eye on competition. We enjoy the Christmas dinner but we don’t have a lot of alcohol or anything like that. We still enjoy ourselves but there is always a limit to what we want to do.
“This year we are in a really heavy training block so we will be training on Christmas Day some way or another – running or a bike ride. We are always a little bit careful as usually we have big tournaments coming up so it is hard to fully indulge.”
You can watch these two put their holiday training into practice at the All England Badminton Champsionships, which run from March 3-8 next year. Tickets for the event are available here.