Hannah Mills OBE is the most successful female sailor in Olympic history. She won a silver medal for Team GB with her crew Saskia Clark in the London 2012 Olympics and won gold in the same event at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. She successfully retained her Olympic... Read more
Hannah Mills OBE is the most successful female sailor in Olympic history.
She won a silver medal for Team GB with her crew Saskia Clark in the London 2012 Olympics and won gold in the same event at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. She successfully retained her Olympic title with new partner, Eilidh McIntyre in Tokyo 2021.
Off the water Hannah is hugely passionate about the environment. During the Rio 2016 Olympic cycle, she competed all over the world seeing beaches, marinas and harbours littered with plastic which ignited a passion into looking after our oceans & the planet at large. She is now using her sporting background, network and platform to raise awareness, change behaviour and influence as many individuals, businesses and governments as possible into delivering positive impact.
Hannah is an International Olympic Committee (IOC) Sustainability Ambassador and launched the Big Plastic Pledge in 2019, an athlete movement to eradicate the use of single use plastic in and beyond sport. She is also co-founder of Athletes of the World, an athlete group campaigning for positive impact around climate change. Their recent video aimed at global leaders at COP26 has been viewed 1.5 million times & generated over £3.2m in media value.
Hannah’s most recent sporting venture has seen her join Sir Ben Ainslie’s GBR Sail GP Team. SailGP introduced its Women’s Pathway Programme in 2020 to “promote inclusion, inspire change and provide opportunities across all levels of the sport” and Mills became the GBR team’s first female sailor. The fact that sustainability is also at the heart of SailGP is something that Mills is hugely passionate about. A unique feature of SailGP is that there’s a parallel ‘podium for the planet’ competition to the one happening on the water called the ‘Impact League’.
In 2016 Hannah won the Female World Sailor of the Year award and was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours list for her services to sailing. In 2021 she won the Rolex World Sailor of the Year award and was appointed Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her continued services to sailing and the environment.