Tower and Town, October 2019 (view the full edition)Tom Gregory"A Boy in the Water"
Most of us like a swim now and then: an occasional dip in the pool, a bit of body-boarding at the seaside. Some of us may even swim a couple of times a week. Tom Gregory is not most of us. In 1988, aged 11, he became the youngest person ever to swim the Channel. The distance was 32 miles and it took him 12 hours. His record will never be beaten. Why? Shortly after his feat, the Channel Swimming Association set a minimum age of 16. Gregory's extraordinary achievement is the subject of his book, which won the 2018 William Hill Sports Book of the Year award and which gives a vivid account of his preparation, both physical and mental, and of the event itself. A Boy in the Water takes you from Gregory's early swimming experiences as a reluctant seven-year-old doggy-paddler in a pool in south-east London, through his increasingly gruelling training regime with his coach - he was allowed no contact with warm water for nine months before the swim and slept in a small room with the window wide open and just a sheet to cover him - to the day of the Channel crossing. One September night he took the night ferry to Calais, brushing shoulders with a cohort of truckers. He recalls wolfing down a huge fried breakfast. Once on the beach in Calais, he entered the water before dawn in "just a pair of Speedos and a bit of Vaseline", with a small light-stick attached to the back of his trunks. He describes the elation of cresting the waves and looking at the support boat in the troughs beneath him; the luminescence of his arms "plunging through the water, creating tiny little sparkles of green"; falling briefly asleep; hallucinating; the elation of being told he had reached the halfway point, followed by despair at the thought that he would never make it, so exhausted was he; the final few strokes; his left hand touching Shakespeare beach in Dover and the muffled rattle of the pebbles on the shore; the reunion with his father, mother, tears in her eyes, and Flossie the dog. Back at school, after his astonishing effort, what most impressed his friends? His Blue Peter badge. Ben Tarring |