Bryony Shaw Talks Beijing Bronze

4 months ago 06th Jul 10:39

Bryony Shaw achieved her dream of becoming an Olympic medalist last summer when she brought home the bronze medal for windsurfing, it was a great victory after missing out on going to Athens.

I caught up with Bryony to talk about her success, her Beijing Olympics and what lies ahead for her, including working towards 2012.

- Firstly you are with the VW Escape Campaign so can you tell me little bit about that?

It’s a remarketing project for the lifestyle vans that VW have, so getting away from that white van man image, where when you walk into the showroom the camper vans and the people carriers are there alongside the standard work vans, so they are going to split their showroom and give it this new lifestyle image.

My involvement is I’m the ambassador as the professional sports person and how I use the van, I basically I use the van to carry all my sports gear to and from events and training, they are very keen to showcase that potential use for the van so their customers can relate to why a van is useful and how it fits into their lifestyle.

They have got a number of other ambassadors; there’s a guy with a family so he takes the kids around and out at the weekend. On the continent it’s very popular to have a van as a people carrier where as in the UK you would have a Picasso or those sorts of bigger cars but on the continent they very much see vans as the family vehicle. 

They are trying to get that family use have that vacation in the UK where people can’t afford to go abroad but if you have this van it gives you this freedom of going around and taking all this sports gear with you and head down to the coast. There’s also the choice of staying in the van, they have the California and it’s like a camper van that you can sleep in.

- So how has the last twelve months been since you won bronze in Beijing?

Well I had a really good break I had six months where I didn’t touch the windsurfer at all, and it was great because it guilt free and I was able to have a good standard family Christmas where I could eat what I wanted, I was on a very big diet before Beijing. So it was just nice to have a different life for that time and spend time with friends, family and my boyfriend as I had been so focused on the sport the year before.

And then getting back into it has been a mountain to climb to be honest. I stepped back on the board in February, I had a nice time in Brazil which was a good step back into it as it’s quite chilled out over there, and I wasn’t in the greatest shape as I was a few kilos heavier than I am now, certainly in Beijing I had managed to get a really lean body weight.

I knew that it would hard because as a windsurfer you hold onto the beam, a bit like a gymnastic girls rotate around the high bars, it’s all about gripping and now I have some really nice hard skin, well it’s not nice or feminine at all, but it’s important for my sport to have good calloused hard skin on the hands. I had lost all of that over my break so the only way to get it back is to go through blister after blister and have that heal and repair and become hard skin, so that was very painful.