If there’s one question you’re bound to get asked by a friend when the Olympics is on, it’s which sport you’d compete in if you had the chance. While we know that Olympians are the best of the best, there’s that little something in all of us that wonders how we’d match up if we were to take to the world stage – if we got the opportunity to run 100m alongside the likes of Sha’Carri Richardson or Dina Asher-Smith or dive from the 10m board alongside athletes such as Tom Daley and Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix.

Perhaps conveniently for many of us, there’s a high chance that it’s never going to happen. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try the sports themselves.

Over the last month, I’ve been trying to do just that. To mark Paris 2024, I set out to try three different Olympic sports in London – all of which are easy to book on or access. I didn’t just opt for the obvious ones like running or swimming; instead, I decided to challenge myself to try some of the less well-known Olympic sports, including skeet shooting, skateboarding and some good old-fashioned sprinting on the track. Here’s what happened. 

You can’t quite simulate the experience of Olympic skeet shooting in central London, but Clays has given it a pretty good go. The bar chain, which is known for its simulated clay shooting games, has recently added an Olympic skeet mode to its roster for anyone who wants to experience the fast-paced nature of the sport. So, not knowing what to expect, I headed down to Clays in the City to try it myself.

Olympic skeet shooting follows a specific template: there are eight stations you have to shoot from, arranged in a semicircle between two ‘houses’ where the clays are shot from. One of the houses releases clays from three feet above the ground and the other from 10 feet – to mix up the trajectory of the clays released.

Of course, none of this really exists in the Clays game. Instead, it’s a simulated arena with the Eiffel Tower in the background to tie the whole thing into the Paris 2024 theme (although in real life, the shooting centre for the current Olympics is located just outside a city called Châteauroux, to the south of Paris). You also don’t get the recoil from the bullets being released, which obviously ramps up the difficulty significantly. 

With all that being said, this game is not easy, and really gives you a feel for the tension of the skeet competition. You only get one shot per clay, so it’s a game that requires patience and accuracy under pressure. And despite underperforming in the rest of the games, I came out top of the leaderboard among my friends for this specific mode.

If only guns didn’t have the recoil, I’d say I’m a surefire choice for LA 2028. But I think I’ll leave the real guns to the experts.

Try the Olympic Skeet game at Clays by booking a session

Until now, my idea of running fast was putting my all into a sprint finish at my local Parkrun. But in a bid to really put my running to the test, I decided to try going super-fast by signing up for an intervals session at my local run club.

The weekly session, led by Tooting Run Club, takes part at Tooting Common athletics track. Attendees can pick from four pace groups based on 5k times, ranging from a 30-minute+ group to one for under 22 minutes. Based on my 5k time, I joined the group for people between 25-30 minutes and prepared myself for some serious running.

The session starts with a slow warm-up lap followed by some dynamic stretches. Then the plan for the evening is set out before us: 10 x 400m with a 90-second break between each lap. Attempting to run fast for short periods of time isn’t something I’m used to, so after three or four laps I start to panic about making it to the end of the session. 

After a while, something surprising happens: I start to enjoy it. Don’t get me wrong, when you’re running, it’s incredibly painful. But getting to the final 50m and sprinting to cross the line quicker than the lap before is seriously satisfying.

My two-minute 400m is nowhere near the 48.36 seconds it took Tokyo 400m winner Shaunae Miller-Uibo to cross the line, but pushing myself to run as fast as possible has added a whole new dynamic to my training – and I’ll definitely be coming back for more in the near future. 

Last, but by no means least, I took a trip down to Bay Sixty6 Skate Park in North Kensington to try my hand at skateboarding. I booked onto a beginner’s skateboarding session, so after getting kitted out in all the gear (not included in the price of the class), our instructor Gary takes us into a bowl at the back of the park to go through the basics.

We start with some very simple stuff, including where to stand on the board (front foot near the screws; back foot on the base of the board) and how to stand when riding (hips forward, knees bent, chin over your chest). The idea of gliding along on a skateboard was a bit terrifying at first, but once you’ve got the basics down, balancing is a lot easier than you’d expect; by the end of the session, I’ve only fallen off once.

Jumping on and off the board as it moves is the main focus of our first session, so we practise this on a flat surface before letting the board roll up and down the curve of the bowl. We also learn how to ride the board up the lower edge of the bowl while bending down to touch the side, which, while slightly difficult, doesn’t take too long to master. 

To finish off the session we leave the bowl behind, heading out to play around on a few small ramps. Gary teaches us how to position the board on the end of the ramp, position your body and ride down safely (albeit while guiding us to ensure we don’t fall).

I didn’t expect skateboarding to be physically demanding, but by the end of the session I’m sweaty and out of breath from a combination of activity and nervous energy. I might not be up to the calibre of skateboarding on display at the Olympics, but I can glide across the floor with (relative) ease, and I’ll certainly give it another go soon.  

Adult beginner classes at Bay Sixty6 start from £22 a class 

Images: Lauren Geall