Olympics 2024: Neah Evans aims for cycling gold at Paris Games

The story of Evans’ remarkable rise is founded in determination, focus and hard work, as well as bucketloads of natural talent.

Mum Ros, who competed at the 1984 Winter Games in Sarajevo, saw early signs that young Neah could have a big sporting future.

“We were all quite sporty and it was part of our life,” says Ros. “We did it for fun, not for any particular wonderful motivation, and it was just ‘let’s go and do it’.

“We did a little bit of skiing and Neah was amazing. We were up in Glencoe – she might have been four or five – and she was doing it all herself. I thought, ‘wow, you could be very good at this’.”

For all that, though, it was a family holiday on Arran that provided the first indication that cycling might be in her future.

“My husband Malcolm, Neah and I were going down a really big hill,” adds Ros. “He said he was going to take off and wait for us at the bottom, but Neah followed him.

“I remember him saying that, halfway down, he turned round and was amazed to find her on his tail grinning from ear to ear.”

That competitiveness might, in part, be borne of having two brothers.

Donald speaks of an “unusual but active” upbringing and their battles to overcome their learning difficulties, something Ros says that home education helped with.

“We weren’t looking to judge ‘have you passed this exam, passed that exam’ because it was irrelevant,” she explains.

“The children didn’t grow up thinking, ‘I’m dyslexic, I’ve got a problem’. They just thought, ‘I can do that’.”