Team GB’s young athletes are almost ready for the 2026 Youth Olympic Games in Dakar, set to take place from 31 October to 13 November.
Around 2,700 athletes will compete across 25 sports in Senegal at the first Youth Olympic Games for eight years, with the last edition having been hosted by Buenos Aires in 2018.
Team GB have won 11 gold medals and 41 medals in total across the Summer Games’ previous three editions. Here are some athletes of the past who have become stars of the present.
Jade Jones
Team GB’s most successful taekwondo athlete in history was one of the lucky few who travelled to Singapore for the inaugural Summer Youth Olympics in 2010, having raised funds from her local community just to take part in qualifying.
There, she beat Vietnam’s Thanh Thao Nguyen in the 55kg category final to become Britain’s first-ever gold medallist at the competition.
It was to be a breakout year for the ‘Headhunter’, who also won a bronze medal at the senior European Championships in St Petersburg and a silver at the World Juniors Taekwondo Championships to be named the British taekwondo athlete of the year.
Jones’s career flourished as she won dozens of medals in subsequent years. But her highlights are undoubtedly her two Olympic gold medals in 2012 and 2016.
Duncan Scott
Fresh from a frightening performance at the Scottish Age Group Championships in 2013, where he scooped eight gold medals, Duncan Scott headed to the European Youth Olympic Festival, where he won four more medals.
In 2014, he had already won a silver medal in the 4 x 200m at the Commonwealth Games when he competed at the 2014 Youth Olympics in Nanjing, China.
There, he won gold alongside Luke Greenbank, Miles Munro, and Martyn Walton in the 4 x 100m freestyle.
Still only 29 years old, Scott has won eight Olympic medals since his junior days, including two gold medals in the 4 x 200m freestyle in 2020 and 2024.
As such, he is Scotland’s most decorated Olympian, and is one behind Jason Kenny in Team GB’s all-time list.
And Youth Olympics teammate Greenbank would also go on to future Olympic success as he claimed silver in the 4 x 100m medley and bronze in the 200m backstroke at Tokyo 2020.
Caroline Dubois
One year after winning the 2017 European Junior Championships by unanimous decision, Caroline Dubois was selected for the Great British team at the Summer Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires.
She won all three of her bouts on the way to the girls’ 60kg title, eventually defeating Thai boxer Porntip Buapa in the final 5-0.
Dubois, one of 11 siblings and sister of fellow professional boxer Daniel, finished her amateur career in 2022 with 37 wins and three losses, including a quarter-final defeat at the Olympic Games in 2021.
She has been the female lightweight world champion since 2024, most recently beating Amelia Moore at the BP Pulse Arena in Birmingham to defend her belt.
Giarnni Regini-Moran
At the Summer Youth Olympics in 2014, Giarnni Regini-Moran produced one of the most outstanding individual performances in the event’s history.
In Nanjing, he clinched the all-around gold medal ahead of Russia’s Nikita Nagornyy and USA’s Alec Yoder, and qualified for four event finals.
He went on to earn a medal in every single one. Golds in the vault and floor were the headlines, but bronzes on the parallel bars and the high bar followed too, to make it five medals across the Games.
Great Britain has only won 11 gold medals across all three editions of the Youth Olympic Games, and Regini-Moran earned three of them within a week.
He finally appeared at an Olympic Games in 2021 after a devastating leg injury ruled him out in 2016. And in Tokyo, he helped Team GB to fourth place in the all-around final and just missed out on qualifying for the individual floor final.
Since his triumphs in 2014, the man from Great Yarmouth has become a floor world champion, team European champion, and team Commonwealth champion, all in 2022.
Anthony Harding
Anthony Harding began diving aged 10, joining the City of Leeds club during his childhood in Ashton-under-Lyne in Greater Manchester.
He was selected for the 2018 Summer Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires, where he delivered a stunning performance in the boys’ 3m springboard to win the silver medal behind Daniel Restrepo Garcia from Colombia in the final.
Harding qualified second-highest from the field of 14 and added another 25 points to his qualification score under pressure to score 559.50.
Harding’s career has gone from strength to strength. In 2022, he won a silver medal in the synchronised 3m springboard alongside Jack Laugher at the 2022 World Aquatics Championships, before winning a bronze medal in the same event at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Team GB has a strong history in diving at the Youth Olympics, with Tom Daley competing at the inaugural Games in Singapore in 2010 two years after making his Olympic debut in Beijing.
Aged just 16, he competed in the boys' 3m springboard, finishing ninth, before winning bronze at the London 2012 Summer Olympics in the 10m platform just two years later. He has since gone on to complete the set, totalling one gold, one silver and three bronze medals at the Olympic Games.
Sportsbeat 2026