Regina tried “almost every other sport” growing up, and then she found rowing at age 13. “It felt like home” she shares. Besides the feeling she loved of “pushing off the oar” and gliding through the water, Regina “saw other women who looked like [her].”

A World Silver Medalist in the Women’s Eight and 2x Olympian who just missed a medal in Tokyo (4th place), Regina and team are chasing the podium in Paris. Her personal motto is that she’s “vicious on the water but super kind out of the boat.”

In our conversation Regina opens up about battling societal norms around height for women and girls. In 6th-7th grade, Regina jumped 10 inches, so her legs were always bright red and covered in stretch marks. She was repetitively teased for being the “big girl” and though she would respond with a tough exterior, the words seeped in. Throughout the ups and downs, Regina turned to her close friends and poetry for processing. At the University of Pennsylvania, Regina was the editor in chief of the feminist literary and arts magazine “The F-word” and chaired the poetry workshop group “The Body Electric” named after Walt Whitman’s poem. As Regina mentions, having these creative outlets helped her not sizzle out on the water. Today she wants young girls to know “how you feel in your body is infinitely more important than any beauty ideal.”

Ritah lost her hand when machete and hammer-wielding thieves broke into her Grandma’s house in 2005. Today, Ritah is the African Para Badminton Champion and was one of only four Ugandan Paralympians who participated in the Tokyo Paralympics.

Today she opens up about losing her hand, and how she’s moved forward (including relearning how to write after becoming left-handed). Her north star? Making the best of every day. According to Ritah, “I never feel cheated because I saved so many livest.” And it was very important that her that who and how she acted didn’t change after the attack either. According to her close friend and classmate, Earn Madrine Nabiwemba “coming back to school with one arm, she was like, you people do not feel sorry for me. This is the same old Ritah and I’m going to do everything I’ve been doing before now with one arm. Don’t feel sorry for me. Treat me the way you’ve been treating me.”

Sam Mewis grew up flipping over rocks in the woods of Massachusetts hunting for salamanders, while Lynn Williams grew up on a pecan farm with her “huge family of non-farmers” in Clovis, California. Flash forward and the two are inseparable. According to Sam & Lynn, they’re in a “very serious platonic friendship.” As former roomies who dominated the field together, gone through injuries and covid together, and yes, even podcasted together, they’ve seen each other through it all. As huge fans and supporters of their podcast, SNACKS, we thought it would be fun to have the duo onto Flame Bearers together. So this episode is a bit different than our normal ones, but we’re going with it! This week, soccer superstars Sam & Lynn talk about their upbringings, time in and after Tokyo and getting in front of the mic.

Sanda Aldass is a Syrian refugee, living in the Netherlands with her husband (who is also her coach) and their three children. She’s a current International Olympic Committee (IOC) Refugee Athlete Scholarship-Holder, the elite group amongst which the 2021 Refugee Team will be selected.

Sarah Davies is Great Britain’s best ever female weightlifter on a pound for pound basis, lifting between 100-125kg (or 220-275 lbs) depending on the event, snatch or clean and jerk. She’s also an international beauty pageant queen. Sarah’s journey is about defying convention, whether it’s in beauty pageantry or weightlifting: she goes for what she wants, and takes action for what she believes is right, even when she has to go against the grain. Across the worlds of sport and pageantry, Sarah is breaking unspoken rules of convention.

Simidele (Simi) was the first African and black woman to compete in Skeleton at the Olympics, and more recently, the first African to take home gold at an international bobsled competition: “We don’t have the facilities [in Nigeria], and we don’t have the equipment, so to know that I was going into that space with a lot of barriers, and to know that I was still able to win was very symbolic. It showed me what was possible.” While Simi just missed qualifying for Beijing in the monobob, this Olympian (2018) was a voice we wanted to elevate because she’s breaking records and boundaries for her country of Nigeria and her new sport, monobob.