Team GB star confirms she will snub Olympics opening ceremony for one key reason
Friday's Paris Olympic Games opening ceremony won't be attended by Team GB's Neah Evans, who has other plans due to her medal ambitions.
Neah Evans won’t be joining her fellow Team GB stars at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony. The Scottish cyclist, 33, prefers not to attend the official beginning of the Games.
She’s heading into her fourth major championships, including winning silver in the team pursuit event at the delayed Tokyo 2020. And she’s snubbed the opening ceremony at each of them.
Evans feels it can impact negatively on her medal chances and says her record backs that belief up. Explaining the situation, she told the BBC. "So far, I've always come away with a good result. It's a no-brainer.
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"Some people, they get to the Olympics and that's their target. They've got to the Olympics and they can just relax, enjoy it and they just get involved with all the stuff around it. Whereas I guess I've been very privileged and always been a situation where I can challenge for medals so it's very performance-based.
"And that then means you go, 'no'. Because, obviously there's a lot of standing about and a lot of waiting. Sorry to burst the bubble. You are standing for like hours and hours and hours to get in the right place so they can parade you in at the exactly the right moment and that's not [good for elite] performance, basically."
Evans, a two-time world champion and six-time European champion, features as one of the endurance riders in Team GB’s cycling squad alongside Ethan Hayter, Emma Finucane and Jack Carlin. While she won’t be sailing down the River Seine towards the Eiffel Tower, she does still intend on marking the occasion.
Discovery+ is the new home of the Olympics. The streamer is set to broadcast 3,800 hours of sport live from Paris.
Sports fans can get Discovery+ for £3.99 a month until the end of 2024 via Amazon Prime's video channels. This also comes with an Amazon Prime 30-day free trial.
"We've had a memo that we're going to take our ceremony kit because you get a special opening ceremony kit and I think we're going to do something on the evening, that we'll probably go to dinner in that kit as a like a nod to it, if you like," she explained.
The curtain raiser in the French capital will be the first in Olympics history to not be held in a stadium. Efforts have been made to keep plans largely under wraps, but it has reportedly emerged Celine Dion and Lady Gaga will be performing a duet.
An open-air parade of 160 boats, 94 of them with athletes on, will travel 6km through the capital, concluding in front of the Trocadéro. Tom Daley and Helen Glover have been named as Team GB’s joint flag bearers for the ceremony, which gets underway at 6.30pm UK time.
