Lola Anderson wins Team GB gold after dad kept diary dream alive

If you had told 14-year-old Lola Anderson that one day she would be an Olympic champion, she would not have believed you.

Twelve years ago, the teenager watched rowers Helen Glover and Heather Stanning win gold at London 2012. Overcome by a “huge wave of inspiration”, she now says, she pulled out her mini Jack Wills diary and wrote in pink highlighter:

“My name is Lola Anderson and I think it would be my biggest dream in life to go to the Olympics in rowing and if possible win a gold for GB.”

Immediately, Anderson says, she was so embarrassed by it that she ripped it out and threw it in the bin.

“I thought ‘that’s just so embarrassing, Lola, you’re never going to do that’,” she recounted on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Her father Don Anderson, a rower himself, found the note shortly afterwards while emptying her bin and pocketed it.

Seven years later, he handed the note back to her.

He had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and wanted her to have it “as a reminder and a memento that even when you don’t back yourself, your parents and loved ones always do”, Anderson recounted.

Don Anderson died two months later.

It was that treasured note which inspired Anderson to follow her teenage dream all the way to Paris 2024, where she and her team won gold in the women’s quad sculls on Wednesday.

“I know that he’d be so, so proud,” she said about her dad during a tearful interview with the BBC. “I’m thinking a lot about him right now.”