Sky Brown might have missed her chance this time around to represent Great Britain in two different sports at the Olympics , but as she returns to the world stage, the expectations are set high. Three years ago at Tokyo 2020 she became Team GB ’s youngest-ever summer Olympian, and the team’s youngest medallist. There are not many athletes who qualify for the biggest event in their sport at just 12 years old, but that is what Brown achieved in May 2021, and the expectation has only grown since then.
Now 15, Brown has over a million Instagram followers, more than 2 million on TikTok, and her and brother Ocean’s combined YouTube channel has over 300,000 subscribers. She also has her own Barbie doll. Born in Miyazaki Japan to a Japanese mother and British father, Brown has spent a large amount of her childhood in California, surfing and skateboarding .
In 2019, an 11-year-old Brown became the youngest-ever Nike-sponsored athlete in the world, having first stepped onto a board when she was just three and became a professional athlete at 10. Brown could have represented Japan, but chose the country of her father’s birth, at one point saying the decision was because of the British Skateboarding Association’s more relaxed approach. When she was chosen for the 2021 Games, Brown became the youngest British summer Olympian, breaking a record set by Margery Hinton, who was 13 and 43 days when she competed in the 1928 Games.
Unlike many Olympians, Brown was already an internatio.