Rutter began fantasising about winning an Olympic medal soon after tagging along with her grandfather, Bill Rogers, to a local shooting range in Berkshire and first picking up a shotgun at the age of 10.
Together they had plotted her career, with Bill always her biggest supporter.
In 2013, at the age of 15, she became the sport’s youngest World Cup champion, which led to her winning the BBC’s Young Sports Personality of the Year Award.
Two years later came gold at the inaugural European Games and her grandfather cheered her on to Commonwealth as well as world honours in the following years – even attending events in his wheelchair after being diagnosed with cancer.
Bill died in 2019 and Rutter aimed to honour his legacy with the Olympic medal he had always told her she was capable of winning.
The tears were still flowing as she dragged herself from the floor, trudged downstairs – trying not to look at her packed Team GB kit laying next to the door – and joined her family who had paused Love Island while she disappeared to conduct the test in private.
She was feeling a combination of personal devastation and “guilt” for her family and grandad who had supported her journey for more than a decade.
“Telling them it was over, with my bags packed waiting for the 6am taxi to the airport the next morning, was definitely the worst moment of my life, she says.
“Everyone just broke down in tears with me.”
The following weeks offered little respite, with her emotions varying from “devastation” to “anger”.
“I did turn off the TV for most of the Games because every time I saw it, it did bring back some hard memories and I was struggling with anxiety,” Rutter says.
“At night I couldn’t sleep because I got myself into quite a bad place where I hated and resented everything to do with the sport.
“I wanted to quit, but I felt guilt for my grandad because it was our passion together and he wouldn’t have wanted me to feel this miserable and unhappy.
“There were real waves of depths and highs that I went through because I didn’t know what the future looked like, because shooting was my life but I’d got myself into such a dark place with a lot of sadness and depression.”
