Sevens switch has Celia dreaming big

CELIA Quansah is determined to realise her lifelong Olympics dream next summer after her lightning strike to the top of England Sevens.

Quansah, 24, was the team’s top try scorer after the first three rounds of the World Series before a knee injury in Cape Town in December put her hopes of making the Tokyo Games in doubt.

Despite missing the next two events in January, Quansah was still named in the provisional Team GB squad.

“It was a bit of a relief as I hadn’t been able to go to Hamilton and Sydney,” Quansah, below, told TRP. “The knee was pretty bad but I was told it wouldn’t need surgery, which was good news as I was looking forward to the Olympics!”

With the Games delayed until 2021 due to the pandemic, Quansah must wait a little longer to grace the Olympics, something she has worked towards longer than most rugby players as a promising heptathlete at Loughborough University.

“The Olympics has been my dream my whole life. I hadn’t envisaged it as being a rugby player because I had excelled as a heptathlete and competed for England,” Quansah said. “That is what I thought my career was going to be for my life and that made me always want to go the Olympics.

“James Bailey (England Sevens coach) took a massive leap of faith in me and helped me transition over into rugby.

“I am so grateful to him because it has worked out amazingly.” Quansah has carved out a significant role within the England team, having begun the switch to rugby at Loughborough where she played BUCS and was named in the Lightning squad for the inaugural Premier 15s season just six months after her first game in 2017.

The chance to be a globetrotter in Sevens came 12 months later.

“I love working with the team and being in that environment and it makes me have a little disbelief that I didn’t transition to rugby sooner from athletics,” she added.

“I loved athletics and made some lifelong friends, but the whole training side of it all being on an individual basis wasn’t something I missed.

“You are in a training group with people, yet they are your competition at the end of the day.

“People may be happy for you if you performed well but I never thought it was that genuine; they want to beat me and I want to beat them.”