Sarah Storey: The Greatest Athlete You’ve Never Heard Of
There’s a strange and ill-defined line that separates truly famous athletes from those who simply draw occasional attention.
Athletes like Tom Brady and David Beckham are still a big deal among people who don’t follow gridiron or soccer; even gymnastics has the superlative Simone Biles, whose dominance has been so total as to push her more or less permanently into the public eye.
But go beyond these sports, and you start finding people who simply don’t exist to the vast majority of the population even as they rack up records and superlatives. Darts has Michael van Gerwen, a treble world champion whose seventeen consecutive perfect darts represent probably the greatest run of performance in the history of target-based sport. Triathlon has Gwen Jorgensen, who raced twenty times between May 2014 and the Rio Olympics, and collected eighteen victories (including Olympic gold). And then there’s Dame Sarah Storey.
Who the hell is Dame Sarah Storey?
Firstly: you watch your mouth when you’re talking about Dame Sarah Storey.
Secondly: Storey began her elite sporting career representing Britain at the 1992 Paralympics, at the age of fourteen. She won two golds, three silvers and a bronze medal at that Paralympic Games. She collected another ten Paralympic medals between Atlanta 1996 and Athens 2004, and outside of Olympic years, she racked up fifteen world championship medals, including six world titles.
Sarah Storey’s Wikipedia page spends about two lines on these years.
Following Athens, she made the decision to switch sports and become a track cyclist. For anyone who isn’t aware, British Cycling is one of the most infamously effective medal production machines in modern sport; of the last twenty gold medals awarded for track cycling at the Olympic games, thirteen have been claimed by Britons. Storey was not stepping into an easy environment; she was entering one of the most relentless victory factories in the world. Did she sink or did she swim?
Unsurprisingly for a woman with so many swimming medals, she did not sink.
Beijing Paralympics 2008: gold in time trial on the road, individual pursuit on the track (with a time that would have made top eight in the Olympics).
London Paralympics 2012: road time trial gold again, along with gold in the road race. She won that second one so hard, she broke the Paralympic scheduling system; the organisers had to order the men to get out of her way when she caught up to them. And she won gold on the track in the time trial and the individual pursuit.
Rio 2016, a full 24 years after her first Paralympics: gold in the road time trial and road race again. And another individual pursuit gold on the track.
Outside of Paralympic Games, Storey continued to rack up results. Three national titles won against able-bodied athletes. 23 world titles in Paralympic cycling. A British women’s hour record in the velodrome.
And she’s still going. She wants to win more medals in Tokyo.
37 world titles. Six Paralympics. Two entirely different sports. Fourteen gold medals. The last US president who wasn’t in office for a Paralympic gold medal for Sarah Storey was Ronald Reagan.
And she’s not done yet.
