Team GB Olympians Asha Philip, Frazer Clarke and Joel Fearon have all achieved sporting success, be it on a running track, in the ring, or on ice.
Yet all three have had to overcome great adversity to even enter their sport, let alone win Olympic medals.
As part of Team GB’s Black History Month celebrations, all three came together for a internal panel hosted by Beijing 2008 Olympian Jeanette Kwakye to discuss their careers, as well as challenges they and other black athletes have faced within British sport.
“I’m a sprinter or a boxer but I’m not a swimmer”
One issue that Philip, Clarke and Fearon all flagged up was the expectation that black people would be competing in certain sports but not others.
Fearon, 33, was a sprinter before becoming a four-man bobsleigh Winter Olympic bronze medallist and spoke candidly about the perceived expectations around himself and his children.
He said: “People can only relate to things they’ve already seen. As soon as I walk into a room, I’m a sprinter or a boxer but I’m not a swimmer. I think that’s how my kids are already being categorised.
“My son, he’s fast, so he’s a winger [in football]. He can’t play any other position on the pitch. That’s where he plays and he’s 11 years old, so I think it’s in terms of just what people see and that’s what we do.
“People are being limited as there’s maybe not as many black people on the hockey pitch for example because we don’t play hockey.
“I don’t know why we don’t play hockey! No-one’s just going to get one of my kids and be like: ‘you’re going to play hockey, you’re going to be the best hockey player.’ They just don’t see it like that so they’ll never have that exposure.
“With my daughter, I want her to feel beloved, I want her to feel strong, and know that she can fly as far as she can in life.”
“Parents are the ones who have to be brave.”
Also a father, Clarke – a bronze-medallist super-heavyweight boxer from Tokyo – believes it's important for parents to allow children to participate in any sport and not be fazed by a lack of other black participants.
Clarke, 30, said: “Children don’t have to be brave, most children are innocent and don’t know anything.
“Parents are the ones who have to be brave. Parents are the people that can notice maybe there aren’t so many black people in this sport.
“My daughter, if she sees a sport she likes there is no way I would not take her, if she wants to have a go, because of the colour of her skin.
“I think nine out of ten children will do it and not look around. Parents need to be brave because I’m definitely brave for my girl because she can do anything she wants in sport.
“It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, you can be whatever you want to be in sport.”
Philip added: “Most black parents believe it’s more about education, it’s more about you have to go and get a job, having to defend for yourself when you’re older because we have to work twice as hard as our peers because of our skin colour.
“Doing sport isn’t necessarily a thing. My grandparents never wanted my mum or aunts to do it but because they didn’t do it, they allowed us to do it.
“That was the only reason why I got into the sport but then when I look now there’s hardly any black people in the sport.”
An Olympic, World, European and Commonwealth relay medallist, Philip has been a victim of racism throughout her time in athletics.
“If our own team members don’t want to fight for us, what am I standing up for?”
The 31-year-old remembers an experience where she and her teammates faced racism at the 2019 World Relays in Tokyo.
She said: “All the relay girls are black. We’re in a lift with one member of staff who was white. A woman came in and she panicked and she literally just hid to the wall and didn’t say anything, and as soon as the lift opened she ran back out.
“Because we just joked it off, it was just shoved under the carpet, but it was kind of like: ‘why am I having to do this all the time?’
“You learn to keep quiet. You learn to tolerate things and move on because if our own team members don’t want to fight for us, what am I standing up for? As a kid I just learnt to tolerate being the only black girl.
“Throughout my whole career and life, I’ve always been told ‘you can’t’ – that helped shape me to believe that I could do anything I wanted”
Clarke’s journey into boxing was different, with several figures to look up to.
He said: “I go back to one of my heroes, Muhammad Ali. Olympic champion, world champion, he’s the one that jumps out at me.
“Then I look closer to Lennox Lewis, a British sporting great, and then even closer, Anthony Joshua, Joe Joyce, Joshua Buatsi.
“The beauty of the sport of boxing is that it is so open to everyone. The second you get into a boxing gym, or my boxing gym anyway, you’re stripped of title, race. You become one of the lads, you become a boxer of that club. You’re treated the same.”
“I find it weird that people look up to me.”
Now one of the most experienced athletes in the athletics squad, Philip revels in acting as a mentor and idol similar to those that Clarke admired growing up.
Philip said: “When they chat to you and say: ‘Asha, I look up to you,’ that’s really nice, but there’s still not a lot of black people in it.
“Athletics is taught a bit in schools but if you haven’t got the teachers or avenues to go into it you’ll never make it as we’re not exposed to it. There’s not enough doors.
“I feel like I have a nice platform where I can share my experiences, tell people what I’ve been through, guide people into different things. I definitely feel like I’m more of a mentor now.
“I do find it weird that people look up to me. I look at the mirror and think ‘you?’ You see yourself and you don’t see that but people do and I want to give that energy. That’s definitely one of my ways of giving back, just being that guide that someone else can look up to.”
Fearon added: “It’s important as well that young people see people like Asha just as she is, talking how she talks, walking and being how she is.
“It’s so important that kids see that she does talk like me, she sounds like me, she may eat the same food as me, we may have something in common.
“So often you feel out of place. In bobsleigh when the Americans all come in, all of a sudden now there’s more faces of colour.
“All of a sudden you’re having different conversations, feeling more at home.”