Busy time for Dearing out of swimming pool
OPEN water swimming ace Alice Dearing might have spent nearly three months out of the water but she has been very busy during lockdown.
Before the devastating coronavirus pandemic, Loughborough Uni student Dearing was gearing up for the Olympic Marathon Swimming qualifying event in Japan, scheduled for late May.
Instead, the 23-year-old has turned her attentions to completing university work, staying fit out of the water, furthering her involvement with the Women’s Sport Trust and, most notably given the recent protests, she has continued drawing up plans with the Black Swimming Association, which she helped to cofound earlier this year.
Increasing the participation of people from BAME communities across aquatic sports is something the BSA, in partnership with Swim England, are focused on working towards.
Alice acknowledges just how key the goal of driving increased diversity in the pool is - and why she is playing her part in that drive.
“It’s difficult, because I’ve always said that I don’t really want to be at the forefront of people of colour in swimming. But at the same time, someone has to do it. You need something like that to create the change you want to see,” she says.
“I didn’t want to eventually retire from swimming and then look back and not have used my voice for something positive in the sport.
“As a child, some of the issues I had going through swimming, I don’t want other people to have those issues, and I want them to realise that anybody of any colour, any background, can swim.
“So I thought I might as well try to use my voice, and we got together a really cool group of people. We all have the same ambition, to get everybody in the water - and we created the Black Swimming Association from it.”
As the slogan on the BSA website goes: ‘It’s time to change the narrative’. Alice wants to play her part in that change.
“I felt that I hadn’t been doing that much towards it, to be honest, with swimming and university and everything - it was quite overwhelming, but I finally felt like I was becoming useful and coming into my own within the association.”
Dearing - who was crowned World Junior Open Water Swimming Champion in 2016 - has already appeared on three senior World Championship squads by the age of 23. Booking her seat on the plane to Tokyo with TeamGB next summer is now her overriding target when it comes to competition.
Lockdown has brought different challenges for everyone, with elite-level athletes like Alice having to deal with unique circumstances and a break to the routine that usually plays such a key role in their training and personal life.
The two-time national 1500m silver medallist returned to training at the National Centre Loughborough on the final Friday in May, as part of the initial elite return to training process.
“I’d never had this long out of the water before. The break has really opened my eyes to the fact that I really love the sport and I really want to be in it as long as I can.”