Peter McGrail: The last Briton to qualify for the Olympics

Half an hour before Peter McGrail was set to leave for the European Olympic boxing trials in Stratford, the Team GB officials called the squad of 13 down into the lobby of their London hotel. Just two-and-a-half days into the event, which had already been moved behind closed doors, their worst fears were realised. “The Premier League had been called off on the Friday, loads of other things were being cancelled. We were all worrying, one million per cent,” McGrail says. “We’d been training for 10 weeks, in Kazakhstan and then Sheffield, my family had already travelled down from Liverpool. We were just hoping it could go on.”

The International Olympic Committee’s Boxing Taskforce announced they would suspend the event after that day’s evening session. For the vast majority of the squad, the news was desperate. But for McGrail, there was still hope. Already a European and Commonwealth Games gold medallist, the 23-year-old required just one win to secure his spot at Tokyo 2020. His first bout, at 7.25pm against Kevin Godla of the Czech Republic, would be one of the last to take place before the ring was deconstructed and London descended into an eerily deserted city.

“All of the lads and girls on the team were gutted,” he says. “We’d been training for so long, ever since Christmas, and everyone was flying. We rarely ever get to be in front of our home fans and everyone’s families had already come down [only to be turned away].

“After the meeting, everyone was gutted. But the support the team and coaches gave me was amazing. They told me I had to keep my head on and focus and take my chance. The whole squad was there to watch my fight, screaming behind me and chanting my name.”

McGrail won by a comprehensive unanimous decision, becoming the last British boxer to qualify for the 2020 Olympics as almost every sporting event across the world was brought to a halt. “It was an amazing feeling to finally qualify,” he says. “I was one of the lucky ones.”

As a lifetime’s work came into focus, McGrail admits obsession provided a blinker to the chaos of the outside world. Even when the administrative mayhem around the qualifiers descended into “madness”, he was oblivious to the sheer enormity of the coronavirus pandemic; his coaches and family doing everything to deafen the noise. When he entered the Copper Box, a vast sea of empty seats at odds with everything he’d envisioned, he remained completely numb to its eeriness; no different to the hollow arenas in Russia or China.

Only as the adrenaline subsided and McGrail’s guards dropped did the sense of limbo now facing every Olympic athlete sink in. Sitting on the train back to Liverpool, he began to scroll through the news and see photos of frantic stockpiling. After five years on Team GB’s squad, the goal he’d finally brought in off the horizon suddenly threatening to move away again. “I don’t want it to affect any of our dreams,” he says.

The hardest thing to accept for boxers like McGrail, whose jobs entail training their minds to believe they are invincible, is the realisation that they are powerless in this current crisis, trapped in a sporting purgatory beyond their control. And while Japan and the International Olympic Committee insist the Games will go ahead, he has no option but to “block everything out” and pretend everything is normal.

“All we’ve been told is they’re going ahead as planned,” he says. “We can’t treat it any differently or let it affect us. If we were out of the gym or took any time off [to see what happens], we’d fall behind and we wouldn’t be ready. To us, it’s happening in July.”

“If it gets postponed… we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, but I don’t want to say cancelled. The Olympics are the pinnacle of sport. I can’t see that happening.”

The Games might well be trivial in a crisis like this, as the global death toll moves beyond 10,000 people, and yet for McGrail “boxing is life”. He was just 10 years old when he joined Everton Red Triangle Boxing Club. Tokyo is the reason he’s sacrificed time with his family and risked his health like all fighters must. And it’s not just about the sense of achievement – McGrail has medalled in all five major competitions he’s entered thus far – it’s the gateway to a lucrative professional career and what comes after. “I want to make it six out of six at the Olympics,” he says. “The better I do there, the better it’ll set me and my family up for the rest of my life.”

So in the meantime, the training continues with little more than a hopeful end in sight. Unable to take a break as the world grinds to a standstill, now like so many athletes at almost complete mercy to the future. “All we can do is just keep working hard,” McGrail says. “I just hope we all get our chance.”