Rebecca Adlington: My stillbirth and returning to work at the Olympics

For Rebecca Adlington, who appeared sunnily on our television screens this summer as a BBC swimming commentator for the Paris Olympics, you would never know that the past year has been one of terrible trauma. In October her third child, a daughter named Harper, was stillborn at 20 weeks.
“For ages afterwards that was just so raw and emotional,” says Adlington, 35, who found out her baby had died in the womb at the 20-week scan and then had to give birth by induced labour.
She has previously said she “felt like I was trapped in a nightmare I couldn’t comprehend”.
The former Olympian, who won golds for the 400m and 800m freestyle in Beijing in 2008 and bronzes at London 2012, was plagued with guilt.
“I couldn’t help blaming myself,” says Adlington, known to friends as Becky, over Zoom from the library of her Cheshire home. “You analyse everything, but I’d done everything by the book — sleeping on my left side, not lying on my back, not eating this and that, no alcohol — and then this still happened. It was very hard for me to accept. I’m very logical so I wanted to find out why this had happened, but the post-mortem [in May] showed there was no reason; sometimes things just happen. I have to come to terms with that somehow and stop obsessing about it.”
It helped slightly that she was able to spend “quite a lot of time” with Harper after her birth; “it was like she was asleep,” Adlington says. The family — Andy Parsons, a facilities manager and her husband of three years; their son Albie, three; and Summer, nine, her daughter from a former, brief marriage — have planted a cherry tree outside their home in Harper’s memory and have her handprint framed on the wall.
They talk openly about their loss. “I had a massive bump,” says Adlington, who also suffered a miscarriage at 12 weeks in 2022, after which she was hospitalised with sepsis. “Summer was so involved, she would kiss my tummy every single night before bed, and was reading baby name books. Albie talks about ‘Harper my sister’ and so does Summer, not in a really sad, emotional way but really matter of factly. It’s beautiful. Kids are so much more adaptable than us adults.”
For Adlington, the grieving was more protracted. She and Parsons received counselling together. “We’re not in a place to get pregnant now,” she says.
She adds: “Afterwards I hated my body because it couldn’t keep Harper alive. I felt it had let me down and I didn’t look after myself: I wasn’t exercising and eating badly.”
“It was only about four months ago I managed to pull myself out of the darkness a bit. I thought, ‘Right, I have two kids I have to be around for as long as possible.’ But it’s something that will always be here.”
Adlington and the family’s spirits were hugely lifted when she returned to work in Paris. Viewers were charmed by her enthusiastic and deep insights when she appeared alongside Clare Balding and the former Olympic swimmer Mark Foster, and heaped praise on her colourful outfits from the likes of Boden and LK Bennett. “I found it bizarre — people were winning medals and everyone was going, ‘I like your dress! But it was such a compliment,” she says.
It was a full-circle moment for Adlington and social media. When she won her golds in Beijing, mass social networks were in their infancy and she was one of the first public figures to be trolled viciously and relentlessly about her looks. “It was so baffling,” she says, as unguarded and voluble in person as she is on screen. “I was like: ‘Guys, I’m not trying to be a model.’ Nobody said I need to be pretty to swim, the two just don’t combine. I don’t need to be stick thin. I need to be strong. I need to be powerful. I need to get my body through the water in the most efficient sense. It’s not to do with who looks good in a bikini. But today I think there’s more understanding of how incredible sportswomen’s bodies are. These guys are doing it the right way. They’re exercising, they’re eating healthily and they’re fantastic role models: Laura Kenny, Jessica Ennis-Hill, Dina Asher-Smith, Katarina Johnson-Thompson. They probably still get [nasty] comments. I really hope they don’t, but there are always idiots out there.”
Now a judge of The Sunday Times Sportswoman of the Year award, Adlington is puzzling over which of these role models to pick.
Some of her highlights from Paris include seeing Keely Hodgkinson win the 800m gold; Johnson-Thompson taking heptathlon silver; the artistic swimmers Kate Shortman and Izzy Thorpe winning silver; Bryony Page claiming trampolining gold; and Lola Anderson tearfully describing what her team’s gold in the quadruple sculls would have meant to her father, the late rower Don Anderson. “It was such a beautiful story, we all cried watching that,” Adlington says.
Adlington also wept on camera when, after a shaky year, the three-time gold medallist Adam Peaty “only” managed silver in the 100m breaststroke. “I was so emotional because even though I don’t know Adam that well, I want to protect him. In 2012, it was really hard for me receiving messages saying I was a disappointment for getting bronze. I really battled with the feeling I’d let people down and I just wanted Adam to feel happy with his achievements.”
Originally from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, Adlington met Parsons in 2017 on the dating app Bumble. “My [profile] didn’t touch on the Olympics or anything sporty. It was only after we’d been messaging for a couple of weeks and he started following me on Instagram that he worked it out. He messaged, saying: ‘Holy shit!’ Then he said: ‘Sorry, I’m more into cycling than swimming.’
Adlington “was one of those rare athletes”, who always preferred “training to actually competing”, and so had no problem retiring from the sport after 2012. Today she swims purely for pleasure but her main focus is her Swim Stars programme, which to date has taught swimming to 8,000 children across the country.
Her aim is to “bridge the gap” for the one in four children who now leave primary school unable to swim, partly owing to Covid and the fact that 1,000 municipal pools have recently closed. Another 1,500, more than 40 years old, are coming to the end of their lives. “We’ve decided we’re going to invest in facilities and build our own because we can’t keep demanding councils who don’t have the funds to do that and we want to ease pressure on them,” she says.
Although swimming and water safety are on the national curriculum, Ofsted does not censure schools that fail to teach them. “And how can they when for some the nearest pool is 20 miles away? You cannot expect a school to transport the kids all that way on a bus and back again to do an hour’s swimming,” Adlington says.
She worries about the safety implications: between 2019 and 2022 there was an 85 per cent increase in child drownings in the UK, according to the Royal Life Saving Society.
“Right now, we are failing our kids. So many people associate swimming with sport and think ‘Oh well, I don’t need to do that’, but you absolutely need the skills for safety,” she says. “Any time you got into danger, more than likely, it wouldn’t be because you’re intentionally going swimming because at a pool you’ll be able to stand up, you’ll be in the right kit, and a lifeguard will be there.
“The danger is everywhere else. You could be out on a bike ride, walking — on holiday abroad I see kids running around the swimming pool and it’s so easy just to fall and slip in. At home we have one week of nice weather and all these people are jumping into the cold water to cool down, thinking it looks really calm and safe and it’s really not.”
She doubts that Summer, who enjoys swimming and football, will pursue a sporting career. “She hasn’t a competitive bone in her body, bless her.” Still Adlington will encourage her to continue. “Those teenage years are brutal. Your body completely changes. Your hormones kick in. Nine times out of ten, you’ve got a brace, you’ve got acne. I wasn’t the most academic or intelligent person at school; I was insecure in the way I looked. Sport is where I found my confidence.”
The annual Sportswomen of the Year Awards, in association with Citi is now open to votes. You can nominate your sporting heroes, from Olympic stars to grassroots stalwarts, at sportswomenoftheyear.co.uk