A teenager when she made her Commonwealth Games bow in Manchester 2002, Johnson, still only 32, has been to every edition since and headed to Gold Coast at the weekend for her second Games down under, having been to Melbourne a dozen years ago.
‘Obviously, there’s a lot of travelling, so that’s going to be quite hard to get through, but once we get there, yeah, I’ll be really excited,’ she said shortly before departure.
This time around Johnson is part of a Sarnian badminton quartet along with Stuart Hardy, for whom this will be a second Games having played in Glasgow four years ago, as well as two debutants in Jordan Trebert and Chloe Le Tissier.
As much as she wants to avoid being seen as the elder stateswoman of the Guernsey badminton team, the Les Beaucamps High School teacher said she will do whatever she can to make her less-experienced teammates comfortable in their vaunted surroundings in Queensland.
‘Hopefully I can share my experience a little bit. It will be a really good experience for Jordan and Chloe to do something on that stage,’ she said, before adding what she expects to find at the Carrara Sports Arena.
‘I think it will be quite similar to Glasgow, so a pretty big stadium, pretty different to what we are used to playing in.
‘Obviously, we’re lucky we’ve got a really nice badminton hall here, but usually it’s sports halls like Beau Sejour when we go away to play in the UK, so it will be very different – much higher, more open space.’
The qualification process for the players has taken place over the last couple of years as they have attended tournaments in the UK to boost their national ranking.
‘It’s been pretty expensive and we qualified back in November, so since then as much training as possible,’ said Johnson.
‘Recently I’ve been to Birmingham training with Jordan and then winding it down a little now.’
Guernsey are not in the mixed team event, which is held over the first four days of competition.
They will be featuring in the various doubles draws which commence on Tuesday 10 April.
Johnson said it is difficult to set realistic targets until the draws are made.
‘Obviously the seeds are another level – it’s not really possible for us to beat the seeds, so the best to hope for probably is through two rounds to the last 16, which is the best I’ve done before.
‘In Delhi I got to the last 16 in the singles and doubles and in Melbourne I got to the last 16 of the mixed doubles.
‘I imagine we will be middle of the pile. There will be some we’re quite a lot stronger than and some we’ll be quite a lot weaker than, so we’ll see how we get on.’
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