‘We were inches from the Olympics’: Alana Snow on Team GB softball agonisingly missing Tokyo

The team face a likely near-decade wait for another crack at the Games, writes Rachel Steinberg

Alana Snow (Jason Lee)

Most Olympic hopefuls can rest assured that if they narrowly miss out on qualifying, their next opportunity is just four years away. 

But for athletes in sports that fall outside the Games mainstream, the agonising interim can be much longer—in Alana Snow’s case, nearly a decade.   

Team GB announcements are flooding in fast these days, with many more Tokyo-bound athletes to be named over the next few weeks. In 2019, Snow and her GB softball teammates were one win away from joining them on the plane to Japan but fell to Italy at the last, gut-wrenching hurdle.