Lizzie Simmonds will compete in her third Commonwealth Games, beginning on Wednesday in Australia’s sun-soaked Gold Coast. Among the most successful members of the team, with 11 British titles, world medals and a fourth-place finish at the Olympics, she has never dropped out of the top 15 in the world in her favoured event, the 200m backstroke.
But at 27 she feels discarded by British Swimming, an organisation she believes regards her as past it when her 28th birthday is still 10 months away. Despite winning the British trials in 2016 Simmonds was overlooked for the Rio Olympics and has not received funding since 2014. She claims it is a case of age discrimination by a governing body that no longer values experience.
“I’ve been consistently ranked the top in the country in my event and yet I haven’t been on funding for the last five years – and that’s 100% due to my age,” she says. “There are younger swimmers who might be slower but are seen as having more potential than me. It’s something we have to deal with but I think there should be more value placed on experience and the journey you’ve taken along the way.
“Growing up I had a very close group of role models who were more experienced than me,” she adds. “They could guide and advise on things. There’s less of that for our younger athletes now because the older athletes are pushed out so quickly. We all want to be like Adam Peaty and so immediately successful but the reality is that a lot of younger athletes go to their first international meet and don’t swim well, maybe don’t get to a semi-final, maybe don’t do a personal best. There’s a huge amount of value in having experienced swimmers around who can help athletes through that.”
Simmonds, who is from Beverley in East Yorkshire, had been based at Bath University, one of British Swimming’s two National Centres for Swimming. But after not being selected for the Great Britain team for the Rio Olympics she relocated to Edinburgh. Her unhappiness with the way she was being treated in Bath had accumulated over a few years, causing her to fall out of love with the sport.
“What I was doing in the pool wasn’t working and there wasn’t too much flexibility to switch things up,” she says, “I started not believing in what I was doing. Swimming’s a huge investment sport. I worked out by the time I’d got to my mid-20s I’d done an average 2.2million metres of swimming every year for the last 14 years. If you don’t have 100% belief that it’s going to make you a better athlete, then it’s incredibly hard to find the motivation to go to training. Bath is a great place for some of the other athletes. But I need a bit more freedom and responsibility over the direction of my career.”
Over the past two years British Olympic sport has been confronting a duty of care crisis which has seemingly infected almost every corner of the system. Athletes have spoken up in their dozens about feeling let down by a regime, partly influenced by UK Sport medal targets, which they believe disregards their welfare.
“In some ways it’s liberating not being on funding,” says Simmonds, “If I ended up on funding again – and I’m not sure I ever will – it would just be a bonus for me. Whereas young athletes these days panic through the rounds of a competition because they’re worried about how they’re performances are affecting their funding, there’s such jeopardy attached.
“In my personal experience medals are prized over the mental wellbeing of athletes,” she adds. “There should be more done to make sure athletes are being invested in not just as statistics and numbers on a medal table but as human beings. Are we developing their talents outside the pool? Are they happy?”
Swimming at the Commonwealth Games is one of the more competitive of the 19 sports on show. In the 200m backstroke Simmonds will face the Canadians Taylor Ruck and Kylie Masse and Australians Kaylee McKeown and Emily Seebohm, who between them have four of the top five 200m times in the world this year. Simmonds has the seventh best in the Commonwealth but hopes her wiliness will mean she is in the hunt for another Commonwealth medal to add to the silver she won in Delhi in 2010.
Her performance in Australia could determine whether she continues swimming competitively until the European Championships this summer and even the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. One thing is certain: she still looks like an international athlete. Simmonds recently went viral with her tale of an encounter at the swimming baths in Edinburgh recounted on her Twitter feed. A woman in the public lane stopped to tell her “you’re very good at swimming, you know”.
After Simmonds thanked her, the woman said: “No seriously, you should try and do a trial with the county club!” Simmonds then responded: “Well I actually went to a couple of Olympics” to which the woman replied: “Me too. Which sports did you manage to get tickets for?” The tweet has been shared more than 28,000 times including by Piers Morgan and US TV channels. It has led to abuse of Simmonds for what some perceived as her mocking the woman.
“She was a lovely lady and we had a good chat afterwards,” says Simmonds. “But it was a true demonstration of the exponential power of social media and an amusing episode which was taken out of context by some people while others found very funny. Piers Morgan has a lot to answer for.”
