Music provides ‘outlet’ for gold swimming star
11 Alice Tai
Like a rock star on tour, Alice Tai often packs her ukulele before travelling to major competitions overseas. The four stringed-instrument travels with her swimming cap and goggles and forms part of a world where strumming and swimming work in perfect harmony.
“Music is a massive creative outlet,” Tai, one of our Telegraph Tokyo Eight, says. “In swimming, we get told a lot to control our emotions, because if you turn up to the pool on a bad day, you don’t want it to affect training or a competition.”
The 20-year-old was on the cusp of quitting the sport five years ago after struggling with motivational issues at her former Manchester training base.
Immersing herself in a two-year music course provided a lifeline for Tai, who desperately yearned to rekindle a childhood passion.
“Me and a couple of mates are going to be starting a band. It’s really early stages. We’re still throwing around ideas, but watch this space. We’ve already got three or four songs, but we need to rehearse them together.
“My parents paid for me to have piano and clarinet lessons for a year and then I stopped to have surgery,” says Tai, who was born with bilateral talipes (club foot), a condition which affects her mobility.
“I was on a ton of medication and there was no point in me doing them, as I was just sat there like a potato. I never picked them back up.”
Tai is in a much happier place after her mesmerising haul of seven golds at the Para Swimming World Championships at the
London Aquatics Centre in September. Finishing the event as the most decorated para-athlete meant she pipped Adam Peaty to Athlete of the Year at the British Swimming awards.
“We organised an after-party after the worlds,” says Bournemouth-born Tai who, beyond music, credits her success to new coach David Heathcock at her Ealing base. “It was a massive celebration for the athletes at the end. British Swimming set a 2am curfew, but it started getting good by then! We have so many friends around the world and there’s only a couple of times every four years when everyone is in the same place.”
It also meant losing quality time with her boyfriend, Italian para-swimmer Simone Barlaam. The pair met at the European Championships in Dublin last year, when Tai was offering mints to a group of swimmers and sweetly extended the offer to the onlooking S10 swimmer – the same category where Tai made her Paralympic debut in Rio four years ago and won 100 metres backstroke bronze. She has since been reclassified in the S8 category, for swimmers with impaired muscle power. It is a class which she has dominated, but the nature of para-sport means athletes cannot rest easy. “You never know who’s going to pop into your categories,” she says. “Disabilities can be acquired during a lifetime. An ablebodied swimmer at a high level could get injured and come into para-sport. It’s hard to judge it on medals. It’s sort of the unknown. In training, it always pushes me because you never know if someone could come along one day and be faster than me. But I enjoy that uncertainty.”
Such uncertainty is offset by the prospect of competing at the Paralympics in Tokyo next year, in a country where para-sport has rocketed in popularity.
More than three million ticket requests have been submitted for the Games – with 2.3 million available – three times the demand one year out from the London Paralympics, which is often seen as the benchmark, with 2.7 million tickets sold. It comes at a time when the momentum in para-sport sparked by London 2012 has somewhat plateaued: not one para-athlete made the shortlist for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year, while para-cyclist Hannah Dines recently decried the unwelcome “inspiration porn” para-athletes continue to attract because of their disability. Tai, who relies on crutches when walking, experiences similar rhetoric on a regular basis.
“People in the street think I’m injured,” she says. “They say to me, ‘Keep fighting, get better soon!’ I don’t really mind. The best is when parents will come up to me and tell me I’ve inspired their child. Someone tagged me in a post on Twitter where their kid had got a Lego swimming figure and they said, ‘Look Mummy, I’ve got a Lego Alice Tai!’ That made my day.”
But there have been darker days, too. In January, Tai was banned from competing in the final of the Middlesex Youth County Championships due to the way in which conditions by Swim England had been communicated to event organisers. She had competed in the heats with able-bodied athletes and her time of 1 min 09.22sec in the 100m – the fourth fastest across all age groups at the event – would have put her in the running for a medal. “I’m actually really
glad that happened,” Tai says. “It was a really old rule and no one had really reviewed it because they [the organisers] wouldn’t have thought that a para-swimmer would qualify for the final at all. But off the back of that, it was really positive. Swim England looked at it straight away and changed it.”
She also has to juggle her own long-term health with the possibility of more foot operations. “There are a couple that the hospital still want to do and which the doctors think could help,” she says. “But I don’t think being out for a few months at a time is kind of worth it. I’d still have to use crutches afterwards to walk so it wouldn’t really change much.”
There was, though, one unexpected benefit from a previous operation. More swimming training. “It became almost rehab for the surgery I had. I’d had foot surgery, my foot position would change and I would have to re-learn to walk. The only time I could exercise was in the pool to stay active.
She remains adamant that Paralympians’ successes resonate more with the disabled population, rather than with themselves. To that end, the bubbly Tai is open to the prospect of swapping a swimming cap for sequins and following in the steps of Paralympians Will Bayley and Lauren Steadman’s on Strictly Come Dancing.
“There are still people who turn round and think a disability is the worst thing that could happen, but it’s really not,” Tai says. “There are so many options out there.”