Spurs fan Tom leads GB rugby sevens team into Olympics

Spurs fan Tom Mitchell has come through a testing year to captain Great Britain’s rugby sevens team at the Tokyo Olympics. Here’s his Spurs story...

Random. That’s the key word connecting Tom Mitchell and Spurs. Random.

Olympic silver medallist in 2016, Great Britain’s proud rugby sevens captain for the Tokyo Games had just stepped out of a ‘hot pod’ for another 40-minute bike session in 37 degrees heat when he took time to speak to us this week. “You suddenly think ‘wow, this is what we’ll have to contend with out there’, but I’m sure this work will stand us in good stead,” he said, counting down the hours before flying out to Japan. “You get that voice in your head after about 10 minutes, ‘just slow down, ease off a bit’, but you have to push through. It’s a good exercise for the mental battle ahead.”

Tom was first introduced as a Spurs fan alongside team-mate and now coach, James Rodwell, at the Lane in January, 2017, having won that silver in August, 2016.

“My introduction to Spurs is so random, a bit lacklustre as well, a bit niche,” he explained. “When I was younger – and I must have been pretty young, as I didn’t know too much about football at that point – I played football at the local club and was bought a shirt to wear. It wasn’t a team shirt, just a standard plain shirt. Someone said to me ‘that looks like a Spurs shirt’, and I thought ‘yes, awesome, I’ll support them’. That was that! That Christmas, I was bought a framed picture with Darren Anderton and Teddy Sheringham on it, and it all built from there. I was seven at that time. It must have been around 1996 when I was fully getting into it.

“Tottenham isn’t close in terms of where we live (he was brought up in Sussex), so I didn’t get to White Hart Lane many times. In fact, I went to see a few away games at first. I’m pretty sure my first game was at Crystal Palace. That was random as well! I remember I went with my cousin’s boyfriend at the time, he got tickets and he was a staunch Palace fan, so we were sat in the home end with all the Palace fans. He told me not to cheer if Spurs scored! I didn’t really get it back then, but I remember hearing more swear words that day that I’d ever heard in my life!”

Rugby started entering Tom’s life in secondary school, but he stuck with playing club football rather than rugby. “I loved it,” he said. “But I got to 14 and stopped playing club football because it was getting a bit too much with schoolwork - we were at school on Saturdays as well. It was a great school, Worth in Sussex, and gradually rugby started taking over at 15, 16. I had a bit more prowess on the rugby field and, realistically, I didn’t have the talent to do anything in football."

Football’s loss has been rugby’s gain, spectacularly so in terms of rugby sevens. A fly-half for Oxford University - and try-scorer in Oxford’s Varsity win against Cambridge at Twickenham in 2011 - Tom was invited to a train with the England Sevens and made his debut in the World Series in 2012.

He’s been a regular since then, winning silver with GB in Rio in 2016, captaining England to a bronze in the Commonwealth Games in 2018 and now taking the armband again and the honour of leading GB to the Olympics in Tokyo. He’s also helped England to a best second-place finish in the World Series in 2016/17 - the World Series a championship of 15 countries including all the power nations from the northern and southern hemispheres held over 10 weekend tournaments across the world.

“My career has always been with rugby sevens since I started back in 2012,” he said. “It’s amazing, really. Looking back over the last 10 or so years, having the opportunity to travel all over the world through playing sport is such a beautiful thing. There is so much energy, so much fun in the events, everyone loves it. To be part of that, to play in such fantastic stadiums in places like Cape Town, Hong Kong, it’s unbelievable, and I’ve so many special memories. All that and I’m doing it with people who I’ve grown close to and who I care about. It’s really rewarding and I’m very fortunate.

“And now we’ve the Olympics as well. When you get into rugby, you don’t think the Olympics is going to be a thing for you. I remember watching the 2000 Sydney Olympics and thinking, ‘I’d love to go to the Olympics’ but when I got into rugby, I didn’t think that was going to be an option. Lo and behold, a few years later, rugby sevens is in the Olympics, and we got that opportunity in 2016. I’m living a childhood dream and I don’t take that for granted.”

It has been a testing year though for Tom and his team-mates with rugby hit hard, like most sports, by the global coronavirus pandemic. The Olympics were delayed by a year, the World Series was cancelled in June and then funding was cut in August. However, the RFU, SRU and WRU secured funding for GB thanks to an innovative commercial partnership with The National Lottery announced in December.

“We didn’t have training matches or tournaments, they were all cancelled, and it looked very bleak this time last year,” said Tom. “We had to stay in shape, train in ones and twos and it was pretty impressive in the way everyone responded. That is something that has inspired me, and I believe it’s given us a good fire ahead of the Games. We came together as a squad in March and through it all we’ve remembered how grateful we are to have a team. But here we are, ready for the Olympics. That’s a lesson – ride out the hard times.”

GB take on Canada, Fiji and hosts Japan in the Olympic sevens, held between Monday and Wednesday next week (26-28 July) at Tokyo Stadium. The top two plus two best third-place finishers from three groups of four will progress to the quarter-finals. Now 31, Tom would love nothing more than to turn Rio’s silver into gold in Tokyo.

“We have three different challenges, and we’ll have to adapt game to game,” said Tom. “Canada, they’ve been together for a while and started to come good. We then play the favourites in some ways in Fiji, the defending gold medallists, they are always good. Then it’s a great opportunity to play the hosts, that will be special. It’s a shame there are no crowds, but we would have relished that anyway.

“We went to get our kit a few weeks ago and we were given a presentation on the history of Britain at the Olympics. The light is shining on us now, but for years before it’s shone on other people. There aren’t that many, about 6,000. It sounds like a lot, but over the history of the Olympic Games, it’s not that many people who have worn this kit and had the GB lion on their chest. It’s a relatively exclusive club. That’s what is really hitting home now, being part of a select group that carries a lot of responsibility, but also satisfaction of being an Olympian.

“I’m very fortunate. It means more in some ways this time around, especially after what we’ve been through in the last 15 months, and I’m leading a particularly resilient group with a lot of amazing people involved, not just players, staff as well.

“Rio in 2016 was very special. It’s funny, five years on, I’m saying that and I’m not sure if it will ever sink in. If you’d told my five-year-old self that was going to happen, I would never have believed it, and maybe never will. Now, looking back, you realise how much goes into it and how difficult it is to achieve at that level. Now I’d like to go one better and get gold. That would be nice.”