About Harry Hayfield
Harry comes from a small village in Wales, a country that gets to compete on the international level in its own right at the Commonwealth Games, and his interest in the Olympic Games comes from those Games. His first memory of watching an international multi-sport event was the 1982 Commonwealth Games held in Brisbane, Australia, however because of the time zone differences between the United Kingdom and the host nation he didn’t get to see his first opening ceremony until the Games held in Seoul, South Korea in 1988. Since then, he has watched as much as is possible of every Summer and Winter Olympics (as well as the Youth Olympics, Commonwealth Games and Universiade Games) and tallying up the medals won in each sport in order to inform his grandparents (who he is a registered carer for) how Great Britain are doing in those Games and to add to his collection of Olympic information in order to answer questions online ranging from “If Russia were banned from the Olympics, how many extra medals would #TeamGB win?” to “I just loved that piece of music that that Russian skater danced to, what’s it called?”
When not watching the Olympics, he is a community councillor (one of the lower rungs of the local government ladder in the United Kingdom) and has been since 2012 on his fourth attempt at the position and over the last four years has tried his best to get the local community to become more physically active, but realises that as 26% of the community are over the age of 65 (and two thirds of that group are disabled) those aims are on a very long term basis but having signed up for the 2012 Games Maker programme which has now transitioned into the Join In campaign, he hopes that he can help with the promotion of sports wherever possible. If circumstances were to allow, he wouldn’t mind having a go at Freestyle Dressage at the Tokyo Games of 2020 but realises it is perhaps far better that he helps those who have not only the desire but the means to attend an Olympics, such as a friend of his from the United States who wanted to compete in the wrestling in London (but couldn’t as it meant missing the birth of his first son) and in Rio (but did not want to run the risk of contracting Zika), to compete for his nation at the next Games.