Alumna Dr Imogen Grant is BBC Green Sports Award Athlete of the Year

Trinity alumna, Olympic Gold medalist and junior doctor, Dr Imogen Grant is Athlete of the Year in the BBC Green Sport Awards 2024.

Dr Grant won the award for her work promoting cleaner, healthier rivers and more sustainable lifestyles. At the Paris Olympics this year, she rowed to victory in the Lightweight Double Sculls with Emily Craig (pictured below.)

She is Ambassador for the Rivers Trust and recently received an International Olympic Committee Climate Action Award. Dr Grant, who took up her first junior doctor job soon after the Olympics, said:

Winning this award has been so humbling. I feel like I’m just at the start of my sustainability advocacy and am really excited for the coming months and years.

Change doesn’t happen with just one person, and the work I have achieved so far has only been possible with the support of organisations like the Rivers Trust and river action, plus the backing of British Rowing to lead the way.

Since she began rowing a decade ago, Dr Grant has experienced first-hand the decline in river water quality. She told the BBC:

For me seeing that change and wanting to do something about it has really motivated me to speak up and works with the Rivers Trust to try and clean up our rivers.

We’re sports people, we love an underdog and I just think sport is the right place to try and champion this. We know how to break a really massive goal down into achievable steps, we know how to work together we know how dig in when things get difficult.

Dr Grant has gone from being vegetarian to vegan. While being vegan in elite sport is unusual – she is the only one in the rowing team – she is living proof you can be an Olympic athlete and not eat any meat, eggs or dairy products, she says.

As part of her commitment to avoid fast fashion, Dr Grant makes her own clothes and is working with a designer to recycle her sports kit into a special outfit for an awards ceremony later this year. Watch this space!