Tribute Profile
Holly Thorpe
Age: 34
District: 9
First Hunger Games: 59th, aged 18
Mentored By: Charity Green (59th Games), Michelle Lopez (75th Games)
Kills in the Arena: 7
Mentoring Record: 7 Games/ 0 Victors
Training Score: 7
Preferred Weapons: Dagger
Stylist: Fabian Graves
There are some Hunger Games victors, who, no matter what they might try and do, find their personalities usurped by their actions in the arena. Regardless of the life they live as a victor in the years after competing in the Hunger Games, everyone remembers them for how they played the deadliest game of them all.
Such is the case with Holly, a quiet woman from District 9 who won the Hunger Games just over fifteen years ago in a dramatic fashion that I doubt any of us are likely to forget in a hurry.
In many ways, her Games began like any other; with a highly athletic group of tributes from Districts 1, 2 and 4 favoured for the Games from the very first day, who would suspect a slight, timid girl who covered her face with her wavy auburn hair when faced with the cameras after the reaping, barely made an impression on anyone on interview day and scored a slightly-better-than-average seven?
The arena was dark, dingy and gritty, set in an abandoned school where the stealthy prospered and the large, traditional alliances fell apart easily. Those on their own had the advantage in these Games.
Despite barely being spotted by tributes (at least, tributes who managed to get away from her alive), Holly dominated the arena, despite being an unknown threat to almost all of the competition. It was only once the last of the traditional favourites, the boy from District 4, had been killed that the other tributes finally singled out Holly as the one to beat.
But by then it was too late. Sponsor support from the adoring public was flooding in for the small girl from Nine who was defying all the odds, and the field grew smaller as she claimed new victims.
Eventually, only two tributes were left alive in the arena, Holly and the desperate boy from District 3, who had used scientific supplies kept in the school classrooms to build a sort of makeshift bomb, a trap of sorts, and lay in wait for the girl from District 9 to step into range.
Unfortunately, he miscalculated the strength of his weapon, and both tributes were gravely injured in an exciting yet ultimately anticlimactic end to the Games. With both tributes unconscious, Holly was able to outlast her opposition almost by chance, escaping from the arena with third degree burns covering large parts of her body, and ended up having to have her right leg amputated and a synthetic replacement fitted to avoid further complications from the injuries. The victory celebrations were pushed back over three months to give Holly time to recover following her victory, and even then she struggled to make it through the victory tour the following winter.
Since winning the Hunger Games, Holly's inconsistent health has led to her only appearing in the Capitol sporadically since her victory, meaning that despite only being a few years over thirty, she has quickly faded from the memory of the common man here in the Capitol. Nowadays, bringing up her name in conversation only serves as a reminder of a dramatic finale to an otherwise mediocre Hunger Games.
Still, things have been on the up in the past couple of years, and the victor who was reaped last weekend looks stronger than she has in a decade. Perhaps her training score of seven is an indicator that she's still got what it takes to win this year; after all, everyone here this year has already proved what they are capable of.
Still, if you had to bet on a tribute away from the favourites from One, Two and Four, Holly might not be a bad tribute to back.
Regardless of what you make of her chances, though, the interviews tonight will give us a rare opportunity to see what's happened to District 9's most recent female victor.