Going for Gold
The UK cleaning industry is backing British Sailing Team member and current Laser-Class European Champion Elliot Hanson as he heads to the Olympic Games in Tokyo this July.
Olympic-bound sailor Elliot Hanson is hoping to clean up at the postponed 2020 Games in Japan later this summer and he couldn’t have got there without the support of some of the biggest names in the UK cleaning sector.
Elliot is currently getting ready to represent Great Britain in the men’s one-person dinghy, or Laser class as it’s known to the sailing community but when he’s not in full-time training to achieve his Olympic dream, the 27-year-old can be found working part-time as website administrator at Opus Business Media and is son of Managing Director Mark Hanson.
Born and raised in landlocked Macclesfield, the road from Cheshire to Japan has been a long and difficult one.
Elliot started out sailing as a hobby during family holidays in Anglesey when he was a small child. “I learnt from my grandparents but it was only really leisure sailing, my dad did it too as a nipper”, he says. “But I learnt the real basics and this is where my love for the water happened.”
The youngest of three boys, Elliot felt he had a lot to prove and initially his biggest aim was to out-sail his older brothers and cousins. Looking back, he says: “I quickly learned that I preferred to sail on my own because as the youngest, I’d get told what to do or blamed in some sense. I just really relished being the younger one, trying to beat them.”
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As Elliot’s passion for the sport grew, on returning to Macclesfield, he joined a local sailing club at Redesmere lake and learnt to race. He tells us: “I was fortunate at the time; it was a great club for junior sailors with a strong network and ran Royal Yachting Association courses. There was a great atmosphere with kids my age. We were also lucky we had parents who were willing to just start travelling to open meetings and so on, I personally was certainly very lucky in this respect.”
Using his pocket money, Elliot was finally able to buy his own second-hand boat. “The club loaned members some boats to relieve the burden of owning your own. I put together some of my savings from birthdays and little things and had £100 to buy one of these Optimists (dinghies) from them”, he explains.
“I spent hours with my dad sanding and revarnishing and doing it up. Well, I’d like to say that I did it up with him but in reality, I probably just stood there and watched and was a bit of a nuisance. But I raced it and learned to sail in it over the next year or so.”
Elliot soon realised his passion and drive could take him all the way to the Games. “It has always been a dream”, he says. “I remember being on a family holiday again in Anglesey and the Olympics were on, it would have been 2004. I was asking for results, trying to follow gold-medal winner Ben Ainsley and ever since then it became a goal.
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