Sacrificial Goat

Just Becky

0 Comments | Sunday Telegraph, The; London (UK), Jul 25, 2010 | by John Preston

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 hairstraighteners,” 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
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