In celebration of the 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Paris, GLAMOUR has launched Change The Record, a series dedicated to the women of Team GB, who are flipping the narrative on what it means to be an elite female athlete, from competing on their periods, balancing training with pregnancy and motherhood, navigating body image pressures, and yes, chasing world records.
Here, we chat with Lina and Laviai Nielsen, identical twin sisters who will be competing together in the women's 4x400m relay, about the importance of sisterhood, going public with their multiple sclerosis diagnoses, and the secret to feeling fierce on the world's stage.
Like most identical twins, Lina and Laviai Nielsen have each other's backs. Unlike most identical twins, however, they're spending their summer competing in the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Lina and Laviai, who specialise in the 400m hurdles and 400m, respectively, have already had to navigate the extreme highs and lows of elite competition. While Laviai got her Olympic campaign off to a sparkling start, winning a bronze medal in the Mixed 4x400m relay, last night, she narrowly missed out on a place in the individual 400m final. “I had full faith and belief I could make it; I felt SO ready for the challenge. I can honestly say I left it all out there last night,” she wrote on Instagram.
The night before, her sister Lina also had to process her disappointment after falling on the final hurdle during the 400m semi-final. “I ran the hardest I’ve ever run, with full belief I could make that final,” she wrote on Instagram. “It was the fastest race of my life, but unfortunately, I couldn’t get over that last hurdle.”
Lina received many supportive messages, but by far the most powerful was the tribute made by her sister Laviai, who wrote, “Forever proud. That wasn't the hardest hurdle you've had to overcome in your career. Just the beginning of what's always been rightfully yours.”
She is perhaps referring to the time when Lina, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of 17, suffered a flare-up ahead of the World Athletics Championship in Oregon in 2022, which left her unable to perform at her best. Two weeks later, Laviai confirmed that she also had the condition, noting that she and Lina wanted to be a “beacon of hope” for others experiencing the chronic illness.
The Olympics are far from over for Lina and Laviai, who will be competing together in the women's 4x400m relay on Saturday. I caught up with them a week before they headed to Paris to find out how they prepared for the competition, the importance of sisterhood in elite sport, and why having fun is always one of their main goals.
The elite climber is one of Team GB's best hopes for a medal.
I know Lina and Laviai get asked it all the time, but I have to start by asking what it's actually like to train and compete alongside your identical twin. “It just makes it feel more familiar,” begins Lina. “Going to the Olympics and other competitions can be really lonely – it can feel like it's you versus everyone else. So having your twin sister there, who is basically a carbon copy of you, it makes it feel like a training day.”
“We both know how much it means to ourselves and to each other and so we can offer that support as well as compete.”
Neither Lina nor Laviai qualified for the individual events in the Tokyo Olympics back in 2021, and Laviai came an agonising fourth in the 4x400m relay. “Since then, we were just like, that's not going to happen in Paris,” explains Lina. They had a mentality of “When we qualify for Paris, we're going to make sure that we're on top.”
“We dress up to feel fierce, strong and powerful. That's such a big part of our race day routine to go out there and perform”
“We've now found a coach who works perfectly for us. We've found a way to live our lifestyles in our way, in a nice relaxed manner because what we do is high performance and it's high pressure. You need that balance and we found it,” Lina continues. “Coming into this year, we're super focused because we knew what it meant to us, having missed out last time.”
TikTok content
As Lina specialises in the 400m hurdles, while Laviai focuses her efforts on the 400m flat, the sisters are able to push each other without competing for each other's places in the Team GB squad. As Lina tells me, "We always say that we're at an advantage being twins because we do use each other, and it's nice that we're in really similar events but also very different.
“I'm not going to take her spot; she's not going to take my spot, so why don't we just use each other?”
Laviai, picking up where Lina left off, continues, “I actually think we kind of go in ebbs and flows because we actually have very similar personal bests across all the events. One of us might have a bad day where we're feeling a bit tired or weak, and the other one's killing it, and it makes you think, 'There's no way I should be this far behind. I should be actually pushing this'.”
“It kind of pushes you to make sure that every day you're bringing your best.”
The Olympic canoeist bravely shares her experiences with depression and self harm.
While Lina and Laviai are adept at pushing each other (and themselves), they're also cautious about managing their multiple sclerosis, which Lina was diagnosed with at the age of 13 and Laviai at 25.
“When we approach talking about MS, we talk about it in the sense that every athlete has something going on behind the scenes, whether that be an injury or a chronic illness,” explains Laviai. “That was one of the main reasons why I spoke up about it in 2022. Because you never know what's going on behind closed doors with an athlete.”
“Chronic illness might slow you down, but it doesn't have to stop you”
She continues, “Every time we speak about it, we do want to be relatable, but at the same time, this is quite a rare condition, so it's not relatable to the general public, but to anyone who is dealing with a chronic illness, whether that be rheumatoid arthritis or diabetes, it's not to stop you. It might slow you down, but it doesn't have to stop you. And that's kind of the message that we want to spread.”
While Laviai was diagnosed in her twenties, Lina had been dealing with MS since she was 13. She didn't “expect people to pay attention” when she first opened up about it in 2022. “I'd lived with it for such a long time, so it was normal for me to live with it. But then, when I spoke about it, I realised that actually it's not.”
Lina was inundated with positive responses from across the world when she went public with her diagnosis. “In a way, it helped me accept the diagnosis. I think I'd gone 10 years of brushing it under the carpet, but I actually felt really empowered speaking about it because of the impact that it had, especially on younger people.”
She has since become an ambassador for the charity MS Together, which works specifically with young people diagnosed with MS. “The main thing I learned was that there are so many of us who are under 35 who are living with the condition. It made it feel really positive that we could speak about it because you just never know who needs to hear it.”
The world-class long jumper is using her platform to educate young women and girls about their periods.
As we start to wrap things up, I ask what's one thing that Laviai and Lina would like to ‘change the record’ on in women's sports. “I'd like to change the record on the fact that you can be active on social media and be a sports person,” starts Laviai. "We've spoken about this a lot, actually. Back in the nineties, athletics was so huge in the UK because it was the only thing that was on TV. Nowadays, we've got Netflix, Amazon Prime, TikTok, Instagram… there's so much happening that there's not so much focus on athletics.
“It's nice for us to roll with the times and use social media to show those behind-the-scenes bits or the fun parts or getting glammed up for race day.”
Laviai and Lina clearly have fun with social media – and it's refreshing to see. Ahead of our interview, I spent more time than I care to admit scrolling through their various vlogs, including their incredible YouTube channel, The Nielsen Twins, which has 17.3k subscribers. The twins are an even bigger hit on TikTok, where Laviai has racked up 154k followers, and Lina is not far behind her with 69k.
We finish by talking about all things beauty, which is a huge part of Lina and Laviai's pre-race routine. “We dress up to feel fierce, strong and powerful. That's such a big part of our race day routine to go out there and perform,” Lina explains.
Above all else, though, Laviai and Lina are keen to showcase the importance of having fun. “Everything is fun,” Lina says. “I think this year, we've learned to enjoy athletics. Even though we've had this competition in our sights, we haven't been as pressurised with ourselves as we have in previous years. We're really just enjoying it.”
For more from Glamour UK's Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.
