When swimmer Anna Hopkin from Chorley won gold at the Tokyo Games, Covid restrictions meant her parents couldn’t be there to celebrate. This summer they will be in Paris hoping to see her add to her medal collection.
When she watched her daughter compete in her first competitive race as a nine-year-old, Anna Hopkin’s mum knew she had seen something special.
And at this summer’s Olympic Games in Paris – almost 20 years after those first events in Chorley – Anna is hoping to add to her medal collection.
Mum Helen, who now lives at Ribchester, says: ‘In her first races I couldn’t believe the times she was getting – they were among the best ever for girls her age. That was a wake up call for me that she could be very good.’
As it turned out, that rather under-estimated her.
At the delayed 2020 Games in Tokyo – held in the summer of 2021 – Anna swam the anchor leg of the 4x100m mixed relay team that won gold and set a world record.
A couple of months before her Olympic debut she returned from the European Championships in Budapest with five gold medals and she sealed her place in this summer’s squad by winning both the 50m and 100m freestyle races at the national championships.
But it could all have turned out very differently. After excelling in the junior ranks and progressing to represent the county, Anna turned her back on competitive swimming at the age of 13.
It was only when she was preparing to set off to university that she returned to racing, as a way of making friends.
Anna, who was brought up in Wheelton, said: ‘I started swimming when I was about eight with my brother and a couple of friends from school. I’d had swimming lessons before and learned all four strokes and the teacher thought I’d picked up butterfly really quickly.
‘From a young age I was involved with micro-leagues – 25m races and relays – and some of the times I was doing were pretty quick. There must have been somewhere online my mum checked and found my times were among the best ever for my age group.’
Anna’s performances for the Chorley Marlins saw her selected for the county squad at the age of ten. And that’s when things started to get serious.
‘I would swim in Manchester from 5-7am, then go home, have breakfast and go to school, and then go out to train in the evenings as well,’ Anna says. ‘That wasn’t every day, but it was quite a tough schedule and I was sometimes quite tired in school but it meant I had to be very organised.
‘My mum would wake me at 4am, drive me to Manchester and she would sleep in the car, then take me home. It was tough for her, it was a big commitment.
‘I started in what they call the Baby Lane, then when you’re good enough you move up to the next squad with a different coach and then onto another squad. I was doing that for a couple of years, until I was 13 and then I stopped swimming competitively for years.’
The dedication and commitment required to keep impressing at that level inevitably had an impact on other areas of Anna’s life.
‘Swimming is quite hard to do at that level when you’re that age – you have to go all-in with it,’ adds Anna, who went to Withnell Fold Primary School and St Michael’s High in Chorley.
‘I started to resent swimming a bit for taking me away from other things I enjoyed and when I stopped competing, it allowed me to pick those other sports back up again and start going back to gymnastics, cross-country, biathlons, cheerleading and trampolining.’
She continued to swim for fun and returned to races while she was completing her A Levels at Runshaw College in Leyland. Now with a club at Blackburn, she was keen to regain some of her old form to give her more of a chance of winning a place in the swimming club at university in Bath.
‘I never thought I’d get back to swimming the way I had, but I wanted to join the swimming club at university as a way of meeting people and being part of a team. I knew they would have a good swimming squad and I wasn’t sure if I’d be good enough.
‘I had a really good coach at Blackburn and did a lot of sprint sessions and gym work to build up my strength, and worked on my 50m butterfly. I just wanted to post a time in a competition that would prove I could be part of the team at university.
‘When I arrived they were re-doing the pool at Bath, so we were using a school pool that was just 20m and was quite shallow. That was quite good for me because we had to do a lot of short sprints and I improved really quickly.’
In her first two seasons at university she concentrated on the 50m, qualifying for the British Championships in her first year and finishing second the next. In the third year of her Sports Science degree she won the 50m title at the British Championships, came fourth in the 100m and was selected for the 4x100m relay team at the Commonwealth Games on Australia’s Gold Coast.
‘When I graduated, I wasn’t sure what to do next and was offered the chance to do a fully-funded Masters in the US on a swimming scholarship,’ she says. ‘It seemed like a win-win: either I’d spend two years there, get a Masters and improve my times enough to be selected for the Olympics, or I’d get a Masters and come home, get a job and get on with life. I was lucky it all worked out in my favour.’
She returned to the UK in 2020 and moved to Loughborough to train with the nation’s best and is now looking forward to her second Olympics.
‘It will be amazing,’ says Anna, whose boyfriend Luke Greenbank is also part of the GB swimming squad. ‘I’m expecting it to be a much bigger atmosphere than I’ve experienced before. The last Olympics was special after what we had all been through even though there were no spectators.
‘I have been involved in other competitions with big crowds, but I think Paris is going to be incredible. I have experienced the noise of a big crowd a few times – you are aware of it and it’s good to let it fuel you but you can’t be too focused on it and let it scare you. It’s good to look up and see how amazing it is but not to let that get too much.
‘I’ve had a couple of years when I’ve been less happy with my times and haven’t quite been performing at the level I want to be but this year has gone really well and in Paris I just want to feel proud of what I do.
‘The 100m freestyle final is likely to be pretty stacked but I think we have a really good medal chance in the women’s 4x100m freestyle and the mixed where we are the reigning champions.
‘The world has moved on in that event so we will have to make sure we are at our best. We have seen how other countries have been swimming in the last two or three years and the pressure is on us to swim as fast as we can. If we do that we will definitely be in the mix for medals. No-one has beaten our world record yet.
‘My parents follow me around the world watching me swim. They enjoy the travel and say they wouldn’t want to miss it, but it does involve a lot of expense. I will look for them in the crowd after a race to wave to them.’
And mum Helen adds: ‘It has been incredible. To see my daughter there, among the best in the world, at major championships is just beyond belief. The idea of watching her lead the relay team to gold at the Tokyo Olympics is just unreal.
‘Because we couldn’t travel to the Games in Tokyo, we had a lot of friends round to watch the heats and the final of the first event.
‘When she was young we tended to go to a timeshare near Rutland Water around the time of the Olympics, so we’d watch the Games there so that’s where we went when she was in Tokyo. To be there – where little Anna had watched previous Olympics – and to watch her competing on the stage was just amazing.
‘This year, we have managed to get at least one ticket for every event, but there are so many, and all with heats and finals.
‘We’ll see her before the Games and friends and family will be able to wish her and Luke well. And then we’ll see them at some point in August before they go off travelling – we'll hopefully have a big celebration then.’
6 Lancastrian Olympians hoping for success in Paris 2024
Keely Hodgkinson from Atherton is one of Team GB’s brightest stars. The 22-year-old Leigh Harriers athlete took silver in the 800m at the Tokyo Olympics and has since won gold at two European Championships and silver medals at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham and the 2022 and 2023 World Championships.
Liverpool-born heptathlete Katarina Johnson-Thompson is a double World Champion, two-time Commonwealth champion and multiple indoor championship gold medalist, but Olympic medals have so far eluded her. She was forced to retire from June’s European Championships in Rome but if she can stay injury-free she will be one of Team GB’s great medal hopes in Paris.
Georgia Taylor-Brown from Manchester became triathlon world champion in Hamburg in 2020. The following year she won Olympic gold in the mixed relay team and an individual silver medal, despite an injury before the Games in Tokyo and a puncture during the race.
This will be Bury-born swimmer James Guy’s third Olympics and he will be hoping to add to his tally of three silvers and two gold medals picked up in Rio and Tokyo.
Diver Anthony Harding, who was born in Ashton-under-Lyne, will compete in the 3m synchro competition with Jack Laugher. The pair started competing together after the 2020 Games and have won Commonwealth and European golds as well as World Championship silver medals in 2022 and 2023.
Liverpool-born Zak Perzamanos was soundly beaten by his older sister Holly in his first trampolining competition but – fittingly – has bounced back in amazing style. He has medals from the European and World Championships
