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A world-class sprinter who has automatically qualified for the Tokyo Olympics explained to QE’s young sportsmen the long road he has to follow in order to achieve those explosive seconds of success in a few short metres on the track.

In a special virtual lecture, Antonio Infantino covered areas such as nutrition and sleep, outlined what he does in training, and spoke about the importance of the right mental approach.

Director of Sport Jonathan Hart said: “My thanks go to Antonio for a talk that gave a detailed picture of all the ingredients that lie behind élite-level sports success. It was great to hear his own story and I am grateful that he gave such thoughtful answers to the boys’ questions.”

QE’s now well-established lecture programme gives pupils of all ages the opportunity to learn from and question prominent individuals in their respective fields. It continued online through both lockdowns as part of the School’s work to ensure that boys did not miss out during the period of remote education.

Antonio, who will be 30 later this month, is a top 200m sprinter with a personal best of 20.41 seconds. Born to Italian parents but raised in Hertfordshire, he is based in London.

He is the three times British Indoor 200m Champion and has competed at European and World championships. He decided to switch nationality in his early 20s to follow his Italian heritage and represent Italy.

“If the Games go ahead, I hope to be in Tokyo later this year,” he said. His 2021 goals are to make the Olympic final in the 4x100m – he has already automatically qualified for the Games in this event – and the 200m. Following this, Antonio is hoping to ‘medal’ at the Mediterranean Games and European Championships 2022, before looking ahead to his second Olympic Games in Paris.

Antonio delivered his lecture in two lunchtime sessions. Both were open to all boys. “It all started for me when I was in secondary school,” he said. Inspired by Usain Bolt’s remarkable victory in the Beijing Olympics 100m in 2008, Antonio achieved a remarkable 100m time of 11.3s while in Year 8. At the age of 14, he achieved 10.9s, which, he said, was one of the fastest times of all time for that age group.

In his 20-minute talk, he spoke to the boys about nutrition, about diet and about the “often overlooked” importance of sleep, before giving them a taste of what he does in training. He then spent more than 10 minutes answering their questions.

Antonio paid tribute to the support of his parents, with his mother cooking healthy food and his father taxiing him around the country to various athletics events when he was younger.

In fact, when he went to university, the lack of such support – he had to cook for himself – coupled with some partying, led to a dip in his performances. “Through those bad years when I was not running well, I learned once again to be patient.”

In 2018, after a series of disappointments he nearly quit, but decided to carry on and has since achieved new levels of success. “That taught me that…you are going to fail [and] if you fail, you are going to learn. I have lost more races than I have won, but I think I have learned more from my failures than from the races I have won. So, keep patient and keep persevering and you can still achieve what you want to achieve.”

During the Q&A session, Antonio discussed the issue of ‘nature vs nurture’. Evidence suggested that through long hours of practice and expert training alone, anyone could reach élite levels in certain fields of endeavour. He pointed to the example of László Polgár, Hungarian chess teacher and educational psychologist, who trained his three daughters to play chess almost from the cradle. They went on to tremendous success, with one, Judit, widely considered to be the best female chess player ever.

Yet Antonio said it was not true that anyone could reach the very top in athletics, since in sport, genetics were also important: “You do need to pick your parents carefully if you want to be a top sprinter!”

Nevertheless, for aspiring athletes to achieve success, mindset is very important, he said. “Really believe you can do something,” he advised the boys. “Mindset is hugely important in my sport. I had a lot of naysayers…self-belief is really important.”

Asked about how he is paid, he spoke of his financial dependence on sponsorship and said that he must wear sports clothing made by his sponsor, rather than by other manufacturers.

He had some specific advice when asked about his approach to a race by one of the School’s sprinters, saying that he maps out in his mind how the race will go. He advised sprinters to try to ‘explode’ out of the blocks and then to take long strides in the early stages of the race, rather than going at a fast cadence, in order to conserve energy.

He urged a “multisports” approach for the boys. “I think that everyone should try a bunch of sports, and that’s the best way to find one you are good at.” Antonio himself had played a number of sports during his school years, reaching academy level with Watford FC. He dropped this involvement in order to focus on athletics, but still enjoys playing various sports informally, stating that the general fitness they develop in some ways makes his specialised athletics training easier.

The guest speaker at the Year 12 Luncheon was Sonita Alleyne OBE, who in October 2019 became the first black Master of an Oxbridge College.

On taking up the role at Jesus College, Cambridge, she also became the first woman to lead the college in its 524-year history. QE is the first school she has visited since becoming Master.

After the luncheon she met with Year 13’s Bhiramah Rammanohar, Reza Sair and Drew Sellis, who all hold offers for Jesus College. The trio are among 40 QE Oxbridge offers this year – a School record.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “This luncheon is the first event for Year 12 at which they can gain experience of the type of formal social occasions that they will encounter at university and in their professional lives. Sonita gave a terrific and inspiring address that was perfectly adapted to the occasion. Boys will certainly have gone away with a greater awareness of what life at Cambridge is like and of the exciting intellectual and personal development opportunities available.

“During her speech, she spoke of how the very experience of applying for, and then studying at, a university such as Cambridge, brings together people of different backgrounds, giving them that experience in common.

“This will have resonated with many of the sixth-formers present, since QE provides a state school pathway for boys from very different backgrounds (many of them the first in their family to enter higher education at all) with the opportunity to go to some of the world’s leading universities.”

The luncheon featured the customary toasts, led by School Captain Ivin Jose, who fulfilled an MC role. Grace was said by Guy Flint, Senior Vice-Captain, and the vote of thanks given by his fellow Senior Vice-Captain, George Raynor.

Sonita Alleyne was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, and brought up in Leytonstone, East London. She attended a comprehensive school before going to Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge, where she read Philosophy. A career in radio followed, and she founded production company Somethin’ Else, which she led as Chief Executive from 1991 until 2009. She is a Fellow both of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts and of the Radio Academy (FRA).

She began her speech to the sixth-formers with a word on examinations: “Exams can’t tell the world how funny you are, or how kind, or how much you love manga or wine…” But what they are, she said, is a metric that the world uses to judge success, and so for that reason they do have some importance.

One of her key pieces of advice was about keeping options open: “In life, you need to keep doors open for yourself,” she advised. The difficulty was in knowing which doors they should be. Other people would not always open doors for them, so the boys needed to be active in this regard.

For her, one such door had been Cambridge itself. In her letter to Jesus College in relation to becoming Master, she wrote: “I left Cambridge over 30 years ago, but it never left me.”

As an undergraduate, she had a real interest in artificial intelligence, so, she told the boys, she had planned to read Computer Science after an initial year of Philosophy (joint courses being more common at that time), but ended up studying Philosophy alone throughout.

She recalled that to help sixth-formers prepare for the university application process, her secondary school had just made them talk – about ideas, news, science, indeed about anything. She found she relished this and thus greatly enjoyed the Cambridge interview process and the intellectual stimulation it brought. Not only did she find the discussions “challenging in a way that GCSEs weren’t”, but they helped provide her with a sense of belonging.

Once at Cambridge, she threw herself into many enriching activities which she had not had the time or opportunity to follow at school, including Music, singing, theatre and student politics. She was even secretary of the college Mystical Science Club. (“There were only two of us!”)

She noted, however, that it was the informal shared conversations around college – and outside of these activities – that most helped her develop deep friendships and formulate her views: “[That was] where I discovered my sense of agency.” She graduated as a “free-thinking” person – a recurring phrase during her address.

After university, she had a series of jobs (“a zig-zag career”). “Don’t stress about finding a career for life, or knowing what you want to do when you graduate…take things one step at a time,” she counselled, adding that she is still taking her career one step a time.

Setting up Somethin’ Else at the age of 24 was, though, a watershed moment for her, she said. Today, she enjoys running her business, her media work, and her regeneration work as part of the London Olympic Development Corporation.

She also now takes great satisfaction from supporting other people in getting through challenges or making progress in their lives: “I am always proud to say that I help people.”

Her final advice to the boys was to be free-thinking, to challenge themselves, to “push open a few doors and to follow your ideas, because they matter”.

In a question-and-answer session following her talk, she was asked about her views on lowering grade offers for students from the state sector or disadvantaged backgrounds. “Cambridge should be a bastion of excellence, not of élitism,” she replied, but said she feels that the systematic dropping of grades does not work.

Her preference was to encourage more people to apply (“It’s one of five options and costs no more than any other university – what have you got to lose?”) and to improve access that way. Bright students such as those from QE neither want nor need entrance requirements to be lowered. “If you get the grades, you belong,” she said, adding that it is important to debunk a sense that people from certain backgrounds might not fit in. “My job as Master is about community – and it’s the best job in the world.”

Award-winning speaker Robyn Steward told Year 10 and 11 boys of how she emerged from years of bullying to become a successful speaker, author, academic researcher and musician.

Delivering the Spring Middle School Lecture, Robyn, an Ambassador for the National Autistic Society, gave the boys insights into the particular problems faced by autistic people, but also suggested some ways in which everyone could benefit from what she has learned.

Pointing out that life does not always unfold in a straight line, she said it was important to make the most of the present: “Life is messy. All I’ve got is today – and when I realise that, it makes me a happier person,” she said.

“Find your tribe” – those people one belongs with – she urged the boys, adding: “Don’t worry if you haven’t found your thing yet; keep looking.” She, for example, had had no idea when she started out on her career that she would end up as a professional musician, yet she now plays the trumpet and has put on “inclusive-conscious” gigs entitled Robyn’s Rocket in London.

Head of Academic Enrichment Nisha Mayer said: “I would like to thank Robyn for giving a lecture that contrived to be both inspiring and humorous, while at the same helping to deepen the boys’ understanding of autism.”

In her talk entitled Autism from a person, not a textbook, Robyn told her audience in the Shearly Hall that she wished she had had the opportunity to hear an autistic speaker when she was at school, as she was just made to feel different and “weird”.

She had been widely bullied and called names such as “retard” or “spastic”. This was the result of ignorance and of her classmates being “jokey”. In her view, there were two types of bullying, she explained – the “jokers” trying to raise a laugh from their friends at the expense of someone else, and those who are “mean at heart’. The majority are the former, who, she believed, would be shocked to realise she was talking all these years later about the harmful effects of what they had said.

She was in a special needs class at primary school, but the bullying really started in high school, she said. Recalling the great insecurity she felt about visiting the toilets, she explained that she had been told the other pupils would “flush her head down the loo” and, as an autistic person, she had taken this very literally. Robyn has cerebral palsy, so she was also worried about not being able to operate the locks properly. She was, in fact, locked in the toilet, manhandled and called names. Fortunately, her mother supported her in this ordeal, she said.

Speaking about the effects of bullying generally, she said: “I don’t think anyone should have to feel like that. It is crushing for your self-confidence.”

In 2015, Robyn was joint awardee of the National Autistic Society’s Professional award for outstanding achievement by an individual on the Autism Spectrum for her work in raising awareness of the abuse experienced by autistic people. In 2018, she was listed on the Power 100 list of the most influential disabled people in the UK.

We can all do something to combat bullying, she told the QE boys. If they saw a friend saying unkind things, they could say: “Hey, stop it! That person has feelings,” and could also tell the target of the bullying not to worry about it. And since the boys comprise a community at QE, they should work together and support each other, recognising that everyone experiences low self-esteem at times.

At college, she had more freedom to protect herself – she could leave a room when she chose, for example. She studied IT – and “really enjoyed it”, despite further bullying – and then art & design. She learned at college about the concept of Theory of Mind, which was a huge insight: she realised that being autistic, she had struggled to understand someone else’s perception of a situation in the way that others do through empathy or reading facial expression or observing body language. All of this she had to learn from scratch.

Showing the boys her school photo, she asked them what was different about her (and stated that their age group is normally better at spotting the answer than adults!). Unlike her peers, she was not looking at the camera and was not smiling, she pointed out, adding that this is because many autistic people do not pick up on social cues.

In spite of all the bullying, she now has a full and varied life, Robyn said. “I have no GCSEs and yet here I am, aged 33, saying I’ve turned out all right.” She has a BBC podcast with fellow autistic presenter Jamie Knight – 1800 seconds on autism – and is also host of the Autism Matters podcast from Autism: The International Journal of Research and Practice. She works with UCL and the Wellcome Trust, conducting research to understand how we are all different. For more than 15 years, she has been travelling the world giving talks. She is the author of books providing guidance for autistic people.

Afterwards, Year 13 pupil Saifullah Shah complimented Robyn on her talk and then opened the floor up for questions.

BBC presenter Mishal Husain explained to QE’s Lower School boys how following her own ambitions and focusing on excelling at every stage of her career had brought her success as one of the UK’s best-known and most-respected journalists.

A news presenter for BBC Television and BBC Radio, Mishal is a host on Radio 4’s influential Today programme and is a familiar face around the world thanks to her work on BBC World News’s Impact programme.

She has a number of ‘firsts’ to her name. She was Today’s first Muslim presenter and the BBC’s first Washington news anchor. When she met Aung San Suu Kyi in 2013, she asked the Burmese politician – a Nobel Peace Prize laureate now widely considered to have fallen from grace – about the plight of the Rohingyas. She believes she was the first journalist to have done so.

In her talk to Years 7–9, she spoke about how, in the face of her parents’ wishes that she become a doctor, she had instead pursued a path as a journalist.

She recounted highlights of a career that has taken her to places – including many dangerous locations – all over the world.

Mishal, the author of two books on achieving career success, also devoted considerable time to answering the boys’ questions, having first stressed to them the importance of maintaining a questioning approach in life – an attitude that was, of course, critical to her career as a journalist and interviewer, but was also important more generally, she said.

If there was one message she could impart to the boys, it would be: “Keep your minds as curious as they are now.”

While acknowledging that “we are all a product of our own bubbles” – affected by social influences, families, our education and so on – she urged boys to push against this as much as possible.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “I am sure the boys will have taken away from her talk a great insight into the world of broadcast journalism, as well as much good advice, applicable to them whatever their individual ambitions and aspirations may be.”

“We constantly seek to raise awareness among our boys and their families of the enormous range of opportunities that are open to Elizabethans. Mishal showed our Lower School boys what success can be achieved by following your interests and playing to your strengths – a message that reinforces what they hear from their teachers and one that I hope they found inspiring.”

Born in Northampton to parents originally from Lucknow in India who later migrated to Pakistan, Mishal moved to the UAE at the age of two, where her father worked as a doctor. She was brought up in Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, before she was sent to Cobham Hall boarding school in Kent.

She studied law at Cambridge and then went on to take a Master’s degree in the discipline at the European University Institute in Florence, having settled on Law as a good ‘in between’ subject – one that was respected, even if it was not Medicine.

Yet after university, she sought out opportunities in the media. After starting at Bloomberg Television, she joined the BBC as a junior producer in 1998.

It was, she said, almost the case that she had to appear on national and international television as a broadcast journalist before her parents would accept her not having followed in her father’s footsteps.

She told the boys how difficult it is to become a presenter – an aspiration held by many, but realised by few. “You may start off doing something far from your dream job… but those willing to give everything on a menial job are those that get noticed, and good things come to them: you’ve got to excel at what you are doing today.” Thus, while she harboured ambitions to present on the Today programme – recognising it as the pinnacle of its kind – she focused in the meantime on being the best journalist she could be, before eventually achieving this aim in 2015.

Being on the programme had taught her resilience: “You do an interview, come off-air and then get torn to pieces online.” But she is now better able to take the peaks and the troughs. When things go wrong, she takes from it the lessons that need to be learned, but then turns the page, not dwelling on her mistakes.

Through it all, her passion for the importance of impartial journalism in the 21st century remains not only undimmed, but, if anything, strengthened. In an interview this month for The Sunday Times Magazine, she told interviewer Donna Ferguson: “The purpose of news, I think, is to search for the truth without fear or favour. To do my job well, I need to be able to put my own opinions aside and be open to arguments of different kinds, and to treat them fairly. This era where established news organisations have been attacked and come under unprecedented pressure has reaffirmed why I wanted to go into journalism in the first place.”

Married with three sons, Mishal lives in north London. She is the author of two books – The skills: from first job to dream job – what every woman needs to know and the recently published The skills: how to win at work (copies of which she donated to the School).

After her visit, she posted a message on social media praising the boys for “listening intently” to her talk.

Society and the mass media are the source of stereotypes that lead to prejudice and discrimination, an LGBT activist told QE’s senior pupils.

Jessica Amery, from Haringey-based charity Wise Thoughts presented an assembly on LGBT issues to Years 11-13 in the Shearly Hall.

She told the boys that although she had a transgender parent, she nevertheless faced homophobia when coming out as a lesbian.

And she pointed out the ways in which LGBT people’s mental health is at risk. According to research, she stated, schoolchildren hear ‘that’s so gay’ every 14 minutes: “Every time it’s said, it’s like a little stab to the LGBT community.”

Wise Thoughts’ website says that it “creates dynamic local, national and international arts initiatives and delivers services that help address social justice issues for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex (LGBTQI+) and black, Asian & minority-ethnic (BAME) communities”. The charity runs the GFEST (Gaywise FESTival), which starts next month on the theme of #QueerQueeries.

Jessica began her talk by asking the boys to take 10 seconds to think about how comfortable it is to talk about LGBT. Then she asked them to take another 10 seconds to discuss stereotypes, explaining that stereotypes are defined by ‘putting someone in a box’ – for example, ‘you are gay if…’

Such phrases create fear, making people feel it is unacceptable to hold hands or touch those who are gay, she stated, adding that stereotypes result in segregation. Stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination are thus all part of the same picture, she said.

Some 50% of LGBT people experience bullying, which Jessica defined as including texts, social media messages, people ignoring you or making comments. LGBT students have the highest rate of truancy and homelessness, and their education also suffers disproportionately, she said.

Headmaster, Neil Enright said: “This was an important assembly on tackling homophobic, biphobic and transphobic language. There will be some pupils for whom this is deeply personal, whilst for others it is about understanding the lives of those with different experiences to them and being tolerant, supportive members of the School community and wider society.”

A campaigner addressed sixth-formers about his own mental health journey and told how it inspired him to start a socially conscious fashion business.

George Hodgson, founder of the successful Maison de Choup* brand, visited the School just a few days before World Mental Health Day.

“I’m using fashion as a vehicle to raise awareness of mental health,” he told the Year 12 and 13 boys, adding that his was “a positive message, but a sensitive one”.

In the talk, he recounted the many ups and downs he experienced over a three-year period. “I kept asking myself when I would be better. The biggest word is time.”

He started his talk with a breathing exercise, talking to the boys about mindfulness, paying attention to one’s breath and letting one’s thoughts pass. He asked them to join in by trying the exercise themselves for a few minutes.

George, who comes from near Winchester in Hampshire, explained that he had been hyperactive from a young age. His mental health problems began when, at a festival in 2012, he experimented with drugs – ecstasy and MDMA – aged 16. He did not enjoy the experience and started to feel paranoid afterwards, so quickly decided it wasn’t for him.

A week later whilst clearing out the horses at his parents’ house, he had his first attack: he felt hot, could not breathe and started to panic. These attacks continued every day for a week. He was diagnosed with panic disorder and anxiety, and was referred to CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) for counselling.

George then developed OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and began washing his hands 50 – 100 times daily. He experienced suicidal thoughts that increased over a two-week period.

He saw a reassuring therapist who listened to his story. He was told there was a 40-week waiting list to start treatment and was lucky enough to be treated privately as his parents were able to support him. This treatment included hypnotherapy to put him through the sensations of panic in a safe environment. George was prescribed beta blockers and SSRIs (a class of drugs typically used as anti-depressants).

When he was feeling better, George and his friends travelled to Thorpe Park, where they all decided to go on the Stealth roller-coaster. He realised that the medication he was on had made him numb – he felt nothing, no adrenaline or excitement from any of the rides.

George’s story continued with a referral for cognitive behavioural therapy to learn coping mechanisms. He learnt to challenge his anxiety by breaking down thoughts and trying to rationalise them.

Not long after this, George was at his grandmother’s house where he kept imagining there was cocaine on the table. One-and-a-half years into treatment, he opened up to family and found that talking helped.

In all, it took him three years to get better. During his recovery, he used diaries and drawings to express himself. While unable to go to college or work, George went to his father’s office and started experimenting with designs.

Eventually, he decided to start his own t-shirt business, with the help of a friend. In 2017 he launched his Warrior collection, which includes clothing with words such as ‘don’t feed the fears’, ‘sometimes I’m okay, sometimes I’m not’ and ‘warrior, not worrier’.

His aim, he explained, was not to label people with ‘I have anxiety’, but to encourage them to open up about their stories if asked about the t-shirts, thereby starting a conversation about mental health.

His collection made it to London Fashion Week, with celebrities and TV reality-show stars wearing it.

He started selling his story to newspapers and magazines to raise awareness, and the brand’s success grew very rapidly as it featured in publications including Vanity Fair, The Observer and the Evening Standard’s Style magazine, and was a winner in the British Fashion Startup Awards.

Twenty-five per cent of the proceeds of certain of his designs go to YoungMinds, the UK’s leading charity committed to improving the emotional wellbeing and mental health of children and young people.

After his success with Maison de Choup, George went back to a festival – “the biggest place for drugs” – and found that he had no problem in being there. Indeed, he is now able to speak to a roomful of people, he pointed out to the boys.

Among his messages to the audience were: “It’s ok not to be ok” and “If you’re suffering or a friend is suffering, you are not alone.”

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “George spoke very frankly about his personal experience and in doing so exemplified the way in which talking about mental health can prove an important step in helping deal with the issues that you may be encountering. Through such assemblies we want to raise awareness among our boys of the sorts of challenges that people can go through with their mental health and to underline that there is an understanding and supportive community around them should they find themselves in a similar situation, now or in the future.”

* ‘Choup’ was George’s childhood nickname for his sister, Charlotte, who supported him throughout his mental health problems.