A Liverpool lad "thrown onto a tennis court" at the age of three became a two-time Wimbledon champion last week.
This is the second grand slam win for Neal Skupski, who successfully defended his Wimbledon mixed doubles title with Desirae Krawczyk from the USA. Neal, 32, said: "It's quite surreal really. You win it once and you never really think it's going to happen again.
"Then we got to Wimbledon, started playing, and could have lost the first couple of rounds. We weren't playing that great, and then we managed to pull it all together towards the end of the second week. It was a really good two weeks, we really enjoyed it. It was good for my family to be there because they weren't able to go last year because of the pandemic."
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Now ranked sixth in the world since July, Neal made his Olympics debut at Tokyo 2020, playing alongside Jamie Murray, brother of former singles world number one, Andy Murray. Just this year, Neal has won six Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) tournaments. This includes the Madrid Open, and two tournaments in Australia, his favourite place to play due to the warm weather of the "good sporting country".
Neal's career in tennis was "inspired" by his brother and former doubles partner, 39-year-old Ken Skupski, who retired from professional tennis earlier this month. Neal said he "didn't really have much choice" in playing tennis as a kid because their parents house backs onto Palmerston Tennis Club in Allerton, where Neal was "thrown onto a tennis court" at the age of three.
Watching idols like Pete Sampras and Roger Federer play at Wimbledon every year as a kid, "it was a bit weird because in school, everyone was into Liverpool and Everton". He said: "It was a good decision in the end to train three or four days a week from an early age, and travel up and down the motorways to Manchester and all different places in the North West to see different coaches."
The effort got him a tennis scholarship to Louisiana State University, where he studied sports administration and where Ken had also studied. After Neal turned professional in early 2013, the pair joined forces for Kremlin Cup in Moscow. They lost in the final, but reunited just a few years later to win at the Open Sud de France in Montpellier in 2018.
Neal said: "As a professional tennis player, it's not an amazingly long career. It's quite a short period of time in your life, so you're trying to give it as much effort as possible, trying to be as successful as possible in that short period of time, and then you can retire and have no regrets."
He's now taking part in Old El Paso's #FajitaFriYAYChallenge with Team GB, which has partnered with the food brand to donate 10,000 fajita meal kits to FareShare, a food redistribution charity. The campaign is inviting people to help double the number of donations by sharing their "best 'Fajita FriYAY' moment on social media".
Neal said: "They're basically trying to help with giving back to the community in the UK. I love Mexican food, so when I'm at home or in Louisiana, I always trying to eat tacos or fajitas. It's an easy thing to cook, so you can get the family around."
He added: "The cost of living crisis is impacting on all families, and I think that's what Old El Paso is doing. They're trying to give back, and that's why I got involved with them in this Fajita FriYAY campaign. They're trying to promote it through social media and Team GB so they can get the word around and feed as many families as possible who are not privileged enough to be able to go to the grocery store and not worry about money."
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