Exclusive interview: Georgie Harland breaks through 124-year barrier for women as Team GB's Chef de Mission

Georgie Harland can still vividly recall the sliding doors moment, aged 10, when the opening ceremony of the 1988 Seoul Olympics flashed up on the television screen in the kitchen of her Kent home. “That was it - I was completely taken in by the Olympics,” she says. “I clearly remember the Union flag and all these countries coming together. I created a scrapbook of the Seoul Games. The Olympics became a dream of mine.”

32 years on, and it can be revealed that Harland will create her own slice of Olympic history. She has been appointed Team GB’s Chef de Mission for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and so will become the first woman to take on that prestigious position in the entire 124 years of the Games.

After winning bronze in the modern pentathlon in 2004, she is also the first Olympic medallist to assume a role that places her in charge of the planning, preparation and execution of Team GB’s participation at the XXIV Winter Olympics in February 2022.

“I’m absolutely delighted and extremely honoured,” she said. “The pinnacle is to compete for your country - this is the next best thing. I’ve worked with some amazing mentors who have led me to this position. It’s not the defining factor that I’m a woman coming into this Chef role but I do feel proud of that fact.”

With the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics also likely to become the first Games in which Team GB sends more female than male athletes, it is a fact that also further underlines past inequalities. Harland, after all, was a travelling reserve for the 2000 Sydney Games when the modern pentathlon was opened to women for the first time since becoming a core Olympic event some 88 years earlier in 1912.

“That is quite staggering when you reflect,” she says. “It is getting nearer to gender equality across the Games and it has moved a long way but there is still a shift to go for complete parity.” Having worked for the British Olympic Association for the past decade and been Deputy Chef de Mission at the 2016 summer games in Rio, Harland has already been instrumental in Team GB’s extraordinary rise to Olympic super power.

A central focus has been the development of the ‘One Team GB’ concept which, while somewhat intangible, has clearly had a powerful galvanising effect on athletes not just from the most traditional Olympic events, but people like Andy Murray and Justin Rose, whose careers are usually so immersed in lucrative individual sports.

Harland stresses that it is not something you would force on an athlete but, whether by using Team GB’s history, their shared identity and potential future legacy, you have the chance to create a more comfortable and connected environment. What she calls “our rich tapestry” of past Olympic stories is constantly explored and the wider philosophy informs much of the BOA’s communication and planning with athletes.

On a practical level, this extended to small details like the ‘home from home’ concept of the athlete village in Rio, right down to British tea and coffee-making facilities and the creation of an astro-turf area with union jack deck-chairs where athletes could congregate. The coronavirus pandemic clearly brings a powerful new backdrop and, as the BOA prepares their ‘Games Ready’ programme for everything from video messaging to the moment when athletes collect their kit, they have taken the decision to pause some of their planning for both Tokyo and Beijing.

“If the messaging doesn’t get the right tone, you are better off doing nothing,” says Harland. “We very much focus on Team GB and that feeling of belonging. But what is becoming more important is this sense of the world overcoming the pandemic. Does the message shift to the wider Olympic values? I think there will be a sense globally of all these nations uniting. When the time is right, we can reflect and look at the messaging.”

An Olympic Chef de Mission is a unique figurehead role that combines everything from overseeing each detail of planning to representing Great Britain to the International Olympic Committee and dealing with any disciplinary issues. Harland’s own athlete experience, though, makes her certain about the most important attribute. “You want a person you can trust, who will have your best interests at heart,” she says. “Not too much distraction but an environment where athletes can thrive. To me, that feels like a relaxed environment but focused.”

After her achievements as an athlete, which also included European Championship and World Cup gold medals, Harland will now undeniably also stand as a role model and inspiration for other women administrators and coaches in sport. This new-found status as Team GB’s first female ‘Chef’ is understandably not something on which she wants an excessive focus, but she does then laugh while relaying a lockdown story with her seven-year-old daughter Mollie. “You see things first hand as she grows up and there is the odd comment she makes when I just stop her, whether it’s about playing football at school or boys being stronger than her.

“We had an amusing moment when we were out cycling. She was going up a hill and suddenly shouted, ‘I’m a strong independent woman!’ I was, ‘Probably a bit much Mollie’.... But if I can be a role model for her to believe she can do whatever she wants, then that’s good enough for me.”