Young gun Heathcote and Team GB veteran Grube win Paris 2024 selection
Sailors Vita Heathcote and Chris Grube will compete for Team GB in the mixed dinghy class at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, the British Olympic Association has announced.
Heathcote will be the youngest sailor in the Team GB line-up aged just 22, while Grube, 39, will make his third appearance for Team GB having competed at Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 with Luke Patience.
The pair only joined forces eight months ago but last month scooped a silver medal at the 470 class World Championship in Palma, Mallorca, securing a quota place for Team GB and earning themselves athlete selection.
Heathcote, from Lymington, Hants, is a rising star of the British Sailing Team, joining in 2020 aged just 18.
She was world champion in the 420 class, the youth version of the 470, the previous year and has since scooped a European bronze medal as well as the recent World Championship silver.
The Olympic legacy also runs strong in Heathcote’s family – her uncle is three-time Olympic sailor Nick Rogers, who won silver medals in the 470 class at Athens and Beijing.
The change to a mixed fleet, brought in for Paris 2024, opened the door for Grube to make a comeback to the class he’s competed in for two decades.
“In the run-up to the 2023 World Championships Vita needed a crew, and I was available,” said Chester’s Grube, who’s been sailing professionally since Tokyo 2020.
Heathcote and Grube are the 12th and 13th sailors to be picked for Team GB at Paris 2024, leaving only one spot, in the men’s kite discipline, still to fill if qualification can be gained at the ‘Last Chance Regatta’ for the ten Olympic events at the 2024 Semaine Olympique Française in Hyeres, from 18 to 27 April.
The sailors selected for Paris 2024 are:
John Gimson and Anna Burnet – Mixed Multihull (Nacra 17)
James Peters and Fynn Sterritt – Men’s Skiff (49er)
Freya Black and Saskia Tidey – Women’s Skiff (49erFX)
Emma Wilson – Women’s Windsurfing (iQFOiL)
Sam Sills – Men’s Windsurfing (iQFOiL)
Ellie Aldridge – Women’s Kite (Formula Kite)
Michael Beckett – Men’s Dinghy (ILCA 7)
Hannah Snellgrove – Women’s Dinghy (ILCA 6)
Vita Heathcote and Chris Grube – Mixed Dinghy (470)
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