Elena Johnson: Guernsey badminton player set for sixth Commonwealth Games

Elena Johnson, pictured here at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, has represented Guernsey for more than 20 years

When Elena Johnson was making her Commonwealth Games debut in Manchester back in 2002, Gareth Gates was at number one with 'Anyone Of Us', Arsenal had just won the Premier League and Tony Blair was still Prime Minister.

Twenty years on, the 36-year-old badminton player from Guernsey is still competing and preparing for a sixth successive Games in Birmingham where she will be her island's flagbearer at the opening ceremony.

"I was a 16-year-old in Manchester and a student at the school I now teach at," said the former England youth international and ex-British Universities women's champion.

"I remember straight after Manchester I went to a national training camp with all the other England Under-15 players and they were like 'Oh my God, you got to go to a Commonwealth Games'.

"Some of them did go on to Olympics or Commonwealth Games, but as a junior that was the aspiration, to play senior level," Johnson recalls.

While making it to the senior international ranks ultimately proved a stage too far, being from Guernsey has allowed Johnson to continue to play at a high level while working as a PE teacher at the island's Ladies College.

"When I first finished university, I worked in London and it was an hour either way to get to training, so I didn't play as much when I was working in London," she said.

"When I moved back to Guernsey there was an Island Games and I was able to train almost as much as at university because I would finish work and it took two minutes to get up to the badminton hall.

"Some nights I'd play a badminton match and a hockey match or a football match in the same night. That's the beauty of living in the Channel Islands, you can do all kinds of things at the same time."

Qualifying in Covid times

Johnson is arguably the best badminton player Guernsey has ever produced. As well as five Commonwealth Games and a British Universities title, she has won eight Island Games gold medals and made the podium a further 11 times.

But qualification for Birmingham 2022 - where she will play in the women's doubles with Chloe Le Tissier - has been one of the toughest undertakings of her career.

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The Covid-19 pandemic, and the strict travel rules Guernsey's government put in place to protect the island's population, meant travelling to events in the UK was difficult for the pair.

"The last Games in the Gold Coast was pretty cut and dried because we had qualifying criteria where you had to be in the top 10 English national rankings to get the A standard or top 30 to get the B standard, so we got the B standard and qualified off the back of that.

"This year was supposed to be the same, but it didn't work out like that because no-one would have qualified in anything apart from those sports that are timed.

"It was loosely based on the criteria, in that could you justify that you would have met the criteria had you had the time to do so?

"We had three months to try and meet the criteria. I didn't hit the criteria of top 30, but from the points we got from the matches that we did play, had we played in more matches and got the same results we would have easily made the top 30, so we justified it based on that."

Facing Malaysia's silver medallist Mew Chew Wong in the 2010 Games was one of Johnson's career highlights

Having made the last 16 in the women's doubles and last 32 in the singles in both 2002 and 2006, the 2010 Games in Delhi were Johnson's high-water mark.

She reached the last 16 of the doubles and the same stage in the women's singles - beating Wales' Carissa Turner before losing 21-5, 21-10 to silver medallist Mew Choo Wong from Malaysia.

"I played the Welsh number one in the round of 32 and it was an absolute marathon match and I won 24-22 in the third set. It was point for point the whole way through, and I wouldn't have been favourite to win that game.

"Wong, who won silver, is now married to Lee Chong Wei who's one of the best badminton players ever, and just getting to play her was really cool.

"To get 10 in one game against a full-time athlete from one of the best badminton countries in the world was really good."

She went on to make the last 32 in the singles and doubles four years later before again reaching the last 16 in the women's doubles, and last 64 of the mixed doubles, in 2018.

'Definitely the last'

Johnson's final Games will be the closest to home, having previously travelled to Australia twice as well as India, Glasgow and Manchester.

But she is realistic about how she and Le Tissier will fare in England's second city.

"We go there knowing that if we have any of the big nations like India or England, they are out of our league, and that's the way it is.

"But we also know from previous Games that we're much, much stronger than some of the other small Commonwealth Games associations.

"I've won matches in all of the Games that I've been to, some relatively comfortably, so it is a really varied level, but we are very lucky to get to go and play against some of the best people in the world."

Elena Johnson competed in the mixed doubles and women's doubles in 2018

So is there any temptation to continue for another four years and try to make a seventh Commonwealth Games at the age of 40 in 2026?

"I can tell that I am coming to the end to be honest," Johnson adds.

"I've been really lucky and had next to no injuries the whole way through, I hadn't had any serious injuries at all, but I am starting to get more little niggles.

"This is definitely the last Commonwealth Games, there's no doubt about that.

"Hopefully I'll hang on for another Island Games, but just before Christmas I had a bit of an ankle injury and it was the first time that I thought 'I'm getting old here'."