Tokyo Paralympics: GB wheelchair basketball stars Laurie Williams and Robyn Love on 'flying the flag' for women's team sports

The wheelchair basketball stars are far too modest to take that tag for themselves, but they do cite Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird as sporting role models - and like their heroes, they are empowering women and girls not just as athletes but also by bringing their whole selves to their sport.

The Americans both returned from Tokyo with medals - Rapinoe adding a bronze to the football gold she won at London 2012, Bird bringing home a fifth successive gold in basketball. Williams and Love want to emulate them in that respect too.

"If we didn't come back with a medal, we would be disappointed and we'd probably have underperformed," says Williams, who played alongside her fiancée at Rio 2016 when GB finished fourth. Since then, both women's and men's wheelchair basketball team programmes have benefitted from millions of pounds worth of UK Sport funding. Expectations are high.

"We've sacrificed a lot and slowly we've moved ourselves up the rankings - now we're ranked second in the world," explains Williams. "For a Great Britain women's programme, that's quite unbelievable. It's just never been in our history to get there - it's always been the Americans, the Germans, the Canadians and never really us.

"We've put in so many hours. I think it's our time."