Focus: Rebecca Adlington is in the pool at the crack of dawn most mornings as she steps up her preparation for London 2012 Photo: RII SCHROER
It's early in the morning – very early. Just after 5.40am a tall broad-shouldered woman with blonde hair walks into the swimming baths on the outskirts of Nottingham. Ten minutes later, she’s in the pool. There are other swimmers here too — all members of the Nova Centurion Swimming Club.
But there’s something different about the woman with blonde hair, now tucked up into a blue swimming cap. As she swims, she takes great armfuls of water and thrusts them behind her, sending her body surging forward.
After a while I notice that she’s not actually using her legs. All the strength is coming from her shoulders as she powers from one end of the pool to the other. The only sound is a soft, rhythmical splashing as she goes back and forth, back and forth. During the next two hours she only stops for an occasional drink of water, or a word with her coach, Bill Furniss. And this, Furniss tells me, is just a “recovery session”, a gentle paddle after a much tougher session the evening before.
After the training session is over, she’ll go home for a snooze. In the afternoon, there will be an hour of gym work, then another two-hour session in the pool in the evening. At six o’clock the next morning, it all starts again. There are two years to go before the London Olympics and Rebecca Adlington has every intention of adding more gold medals to those she won for the 400m and the 800m freestyle in Beijing.
Standing by the side of the pool keeping a protective eye on his charge, Furniss says that Adlington is unique. “In 30 years of coaching swimmers, I’ve never come across anyone who applies herself as religiously as Rebecca,” he says. “And I’ve never come across anyone who can hurt herself as much. She’s got the ability to push herself to the absolute limit, and do it again and again and again.”
It’s tempting to assume that anyone who pushes themselves as hard as Adlington must have an unusually high pain threshold. But the evidence here suggests otherwise. Showered and changed after her training session, she sits by the pool and examines the underside of her foot. Imprinted on her skin is a long, deep groove. “I’ve just trodden on one of my hair-straighteners,” she says. “And it’s really, really painful.”
It’s often been said of Adlington that she is a naturally bubbly, ebullient sort of person who hasn’t been remotely changed by success. Certainly, she’s good company, quick to laugh at herself and not in the least stuck-up. Yet she admits that she’s become a lot warier of people than she used to be. “You definitely find out who your friends are and who to trust,” she says. “Now when I meet people all they seem to want to know about is the swimming me. Obviously swimming is a massive, massive part of who I am, but out of the pool I’m just Becky. I’m just normal – at least, I hope I am.”
After all the attention that came her way following Beijing, she’s also tried to step out of the limelight and go back to what she knows – and loves – best. “I really wanted to enjoy the whole experience of winning at Beijing as much as possible. I mean, my whole life had been spent aiming for that,” she says. “But I realised after the world championships last year [where she came fourth in the 800m] that you couldn’t do that and train properly. I’ve always felt very strongly that people haven’t yet seen the best of me. In order to have full-on focus on my training, I had to cut everything else out.”
No more parties, or late nights, or television appearances, or visits to the Adlington Arms pub in her hometown of Mansfield – reportedly renamed after her Olympic triumph. “They didn’t really rename it, you know; they just hung a banner outside with my name on it and then took it down a few weeks later. Actually, I never even went there.”
Back she plunged into the pool, more determined than ever. “After Beijing, people kept saying to me: ‘But what’s your motivation now?’ And I was going: ‘What are you talking about? It’s the London Olympics!’” When she’s expressing incredulity – which she does a lot – Adlington’s voice shoots upwards. “What greater motivation can you have than that?”
Adlington’s failure – or comparative failure – at last year’s world championships taught her more than winning at Beijing ever did, she says. Interviewed afterwards, she broke down in tears – tears that were taken, in some quarters at least, as a sign that she was finding the weight of expectation hard to bear.
“Since Beijing there has inevitably been much more pressure on me. Beforehand, I was Miss Nobody. Now suddenly, I was the one to beat. All kinds of people were offering me advice, but I realised I had to stick to what I believed in. Basically Bill [Furniss] and I sat down and decided to keep ourselves to ourselves because it works better that way.”
Yet there were other reasons that might explain why Adlington didn’t do well at the world championships: she refused to wear one of the controversial performance-enhancing, polyurethane swimsuits, which have subsequently been banned. Not that she sees it that way, though. “As far as I’m concerned, I only had myself to blame,” she says. “It was my own fault.”
It must be a strange feeling – to lie in bed at night and think to yourself: “My God, I’m the fastest female distance swimmer in the world!”
Except that Adlington insists she’s never done it. “You just learn from the experience and move on. I don’t think I’ll realise until I’ve retired and I can look back and think: ‘How on earth did I do all that training? How did I possibly do that?’ I suspect it will completely baffle me.” As for her two gold medals, far from being mounted in a gilded display case, she keeps them in a Christian Louboutin shoe bag at home and has hardly taken them out since she got back from Beijing.
If 2012 remains the biggest target in her sights, Adlington says she doesn’t think about it that much. “I certainly don’t think about it as much as people think I do. After all, I could get injured at any point, so if I base my whole career on London and don’t make it, that’s going to be a complete mess, isn’t it? I’ve just got to concentrate on what I’m doing now, so that I can still look back on my career and be proud of what I’ve done.”
The comedienne Fanny Brice once said of the Hollywood swimming star Esther Williams: “Wet she’s a star, dry she ain’t.” Adlington, however, is as recognisable out of the water as she is in it. That said, comparatively few people come up to her in the street these days.
“It always seems to happen when I’m food shopping, which is a bit odd,” she says. “I’ll be standing in Sainsbury’s trying to decide what to have for my supper and someone will come up and say hello. A lot of the time, though, they just look at me as if they know me, but can’t work out why.”
Several of those who do come up seem to be under a colossal misapprehension – namely that Adlington is rolling in money. She gives a much drier laugh than usual. “It really annoys me. People go: ‘You’re a millionaire, right?’ And I’m going: ‘Really? Don’t you realise what a swimmer’s life is like?’ But that said, I’m not complaining. Even if there was a lot of money in swimming, that wouldn’t be why I was doing it.”
Somehow it’s hard to believe that Adlington is only 21 – there’s a poise, a self-possession about her that makes her appear much older. But then she’s had to grow up much faster than her contemporaries. “I was going away on swimming camps for a week without my parents when I was 12. I had to pack my own bag, make sure that I was in the right place at the right time. Also, I was the youngest person on the squad — everyone else was about 17. As a result, I think I’ve always acted a little bit older than I am.” She pauses, adding: “Mind you, I’m still very immature and childish in many ways. I can guarantee you that.”
The youngest of three sisters, Adlington grew up in Mansfield, where her father runs a steel fabrications company. Both her parents are huge sports fans. “My mum is so keen on motor racing that when I was up for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 2008, I swear she wanted Lewis Hamilton to win.” She’s clearly very close to her family. Although she now lives in Nottingham – in a newly built house around the corner from the pool where she trains – she goes back to Mansfield every Sunday for a home-cooked lunch.
Her parents, she believes, instilled an unusual amount of self-belief into their children. “We were always taught that you could do anything you wanted if you set your mind to it.”
Yet there are some things that no amount of self-belief can get rid of. When – if – Adlington climbs on to her starting block at the London Olympics, you can be sure of one thing: she’ll be absolutely petrified. “I do suffer from awful nerves. I’ve never been so nervous in my life than I was before the 800 in Beijing. I had to lie down. I thought I was going to be sick, or faint. Bill was telling me: ‘It’s just your body getting ready to race’, but I’d never felt so bad. Then I got on the block and I dived in – and as soon as I hit the water there wasn’t a single nerve in my body.”
Occasionally, Furniss says, her morale bumps up and down a bit. Her commitment, though, stays as strong as ever. “Some swimmers, it’s a challenge to make them do the work, but Rebecca is so committed that my job is often to hold her back.”
There has never been a morning, she says, when she’s staggered out of bed at 5.20 feeling that going off to a training session was the last thing she wanted to do. “In winter it can be pretty bad – when it’s pitch black and you feel that everyone else in the whole world is asleep but you. I know I have to do it, though, and at least I go home and sleep in two hours’ time.”
It’s a lifestyle that must make it difficult to sustain a relationship, I suggest. Until recently, she was going out with swimmer Andy Mayor, but now they’ve split up. Adlington, however, is having none of this. “My last relationship was extremely important to me. Although it was his decision to leave, it had nothing to do with swimming at all. If you genuinely love someone,” she says, choosing her words very carefully, “then you make it work.”
Sometime in the not-too-distant future – possibly after the London Olympics – Adlington will hang up her Great Britain swimming cap for the last time. And then she’ll have to decide what to do with the rest of her life. “I know that I’m never going to find something I love as much as this. That’s a terrible feeling. I just don’t want it to end. It is going to be very hard and it can’t be that far away – distance swimmers don’t last that long. But I’ve always said to myself that I want my career to finish on a high. I don’t want to be one of those people who drag it out and just get worse and worse and worse.”
For now, she carries on – day after day, up and down the pool. Does she ever daydream while she’s training? “Oh yes,” Adlington says. “When it’s a hard session you’re concentrating all the time. But when it’s an easy session, like today, I often find myself switching off and going into my own world. When I’m like that, it’s amazing how quickly time passes.”
