Vivid account of the youngest person to swim English Channel
IN THE late afternoon of September 6, 1988, a small boy emerged from the English Channel on to the pebble beach below Shakespeare Cliff in Dover.
He stumbled three paces, then sank to his knees. The boy was Tom Gregory, he was 11 years old and he had just become the youngest person ever to swim the Channel. “There was no euphoria,” he writes of his 11-hour, 54-minute swim. “Just me, sitting on the pebbles. I had been through something terrible that had finally ended, and felt only a deep and extreme sense of relief.”
The inspiration behind Tom’s extraordinary achievement was a selftaught swimming coach, John Bullet, who ran the swimming club at Tom’s local pool. Tom first went to the pool as a reluctant 7-year-old. This beautifully written memoir gives a vivid, child’seye account of Tom’s training and his epic Channel swim – and won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. |