In January 2019,
our university became Team GB's official university partner
and our history department became part of GB forming its team.
Students and staff from the Department of History
were absolutely delighted to work with Team GB.
We used our historian's skills to find out more about the past of the team.
Last year and earlier this year,
I and other students from the university
took part in the task to find details
and information of past British Olympians,
with the aim of creating a more robust and inspirational history
for current Team GB and British sports fans to draw on.
Athletes from different sports live separate lives until the Olympics.
But at the games, the team needs to all support each other
and feel like one team.
When we were doing the hackathon, I think I look,
I followed Kathleen Baker and how she looked into athletes
from the fifties and the sixties and how Team GB athletes now
their main focus is usually their sporting careers
and they train full time, whereas athletes from the 1950s and 1960s
often had different jobs, which is kind of incredible to think about.
One of the main aims of our research was to find
information on medallists from communities
whose history may not have been told or recorded for various factors
such as race, sexual orientation, gender or other factors
which may help inspire modern Team GB athletes
and give these past trailblazers the recognition they deserve.
Antwerps games of 1920
saw the world recovering from the Great War and a deadly pandemic.
Well, among Great Britain's team was one of the athletes
who most captured our partners imagination.
Harry Edwards, the first known black Olympian to represent GB.
Edward has lived an astonishing life,
including being interned in a German P.O.W.
camp during the First World War
while he was still a teenager.
He won bronze in the 100 metres and 200 metres in Antwerp,
and only a few years after the Olympics, he moved to the USA.
His personal papers are in the University Archive in New Orleans
and Team GB kindly funded a research visit the archives for us so we could see
copies of his memoirs and other materials he'd collected about his career.
We found out more about Edward than any other athlete we researched
and our research fed directly into Team GB's
digital commemorations of Black History Month.
Another Olympian I found really interesting
was Saint-George Ashe, who won the bronze
in the single men's schools in the 1900 Paris Olympics.
In later years, he was involved in a violent incident
with a night watchman and he eventually took his own life in 1922
whilst an inpatient at the doctors
and this potentially highlighted an early case of mental health
amongst British sportsmen.
In July 2019,
we sent our first pack of research to Team GB using historic
newspapers from the library's subscription collections and oral history interviews
from the British Library Sound Archive with athletes who'd competed in 1964.
Another woman I looked at who was quite inspirational for me as well,
from the 1912 Stockholm Olympics was a swimmer called Jenny Fletcher
from Leicester.
She was one of the first working class women to ever take part in the Olympics.
She was working 12 hour days, six days a week,
and training to be a swimmer as well.
And she won a bronze in 1912.
She couldn't actually go to the 1908 Olympics
because she had to work to help feed her family.
So stories like that, I found, as someone from a working class background,
really inspirational.
I got involved just purely out of interest
and wanting to kind of develop my skills further.
You’re essentially chasing slivers of information,
and that makes it really frustrating, but really rewarding as well.
I thought it was a fantastic opportunity for Hull.
Something I never thought would really happen in the city
to contribute to Team GB.
If not for COVID 19,
our research would have fed directly into an immersive digital experience
that would have greeted the athletes at the team's kitting out before Tokyo.
But instead we look
to 2021 and perhaps the heritage of another games.
We're very much hoping that what we found out will be of huge interest
to today's competitors and help them build a sense of belonging
in the team.