TV personality and Olympic Gold medallist Sam Quek chats about family life, exploring new career opportunities and her ambition to be on Strictly
WORDS: SUE LEE PHOTOS: VICTORIA PHIPPS PHOTOGRAPHY
SPORTING CHANCE
When guests arrived at the four-in-one celebration thrown by Sam Quek for her two children, they might have assumed the jungle theme was a nod to her time on I’m A Celebrity.
With a backdrop of lush foliage, a zoo-full of model animals and an elegant five tier cake complete with waterfall, the joint Christening and birthday party for three-year-old Molly and Zac, two, had unmistakable notes of the tropics.
In fact, the fabulous decor, created inside a hotel in Merseyside as a scene-setter to a day full of love and laughter, was inspired by the children themselves.
“They both love everything to do with the zoo and animals. I had a vision of what it would look like but it exceeded all my expectations,” says Sam, 35, as she chats to OK! from the kitchen of her home in Wirral.
“Molly and Zac absolutely loved it – even though we struggled to get a model of Zac’s favourite animal – a lion – so we made do with a couple of zebras instead!” she says, laughing. “We had about 150 there in the end. It was like a second wedding but we decided to go big – it was brilliant.”
The day itself was conceived by Sam and husband Tom Mairs as a joint celebration to mark both the Christenings of their son and daughter and the children’s birthdays, which fall only 12 months and one week apart. Both were Covid babies so there had been little opportunity for big get-togethers to mark their arrival until now. But, as the couple explain, it was so much more than a party.
“We wanted to make memories for everyone – create something nobody would forget,” says Tom, 38, a property entrepreneur who walked down the aisle with Sam in 2018.
“We had a really tough back end to last year. We lost Sam’s gran, we’d already lost her aunt and one of my close work colleagues and then we lost our dog too. Work was difficult.
“Even Molly had been hospitalised for a couple of days with a virus. We realised both families hadn’t been together to celebrate anything happy for a while, so here was our chance. We just wanted everyone to have a brilliant time and look back on it with joy.”
The plan clearly worked with close family and friends attending a Christening service at the nearby village church with a f
