The swimming pools are open again, and Liz Byrnes catches up with a British medal hope at next year’s Olympic Games…

Freya Anderson may be a world, European and Commonwealth medallist, and a woman who is increasingly commanding attention on the global stage, but that is a world away from the shy 10-year-old in tears at the side of the pool.

Anderson had a trial for Hoylake Swimming Club on the Wirral but the Birkenhead-born swimmer was so shy and lacking in confidence that she cowered.

“I remember my mum came on to poolside with me and I was stood behind her the whole time,” Anderson recalls. “I didn’t want to go and I was crying and screaming.

“They didn’t put me in the bottom group and I just wanted to be in the bottom group because I thought that was where I belonged and they put me in a group three places higher.”

After a spell with Hoylake, Anderson moved on to Wirral Metro and after initially specialising in breaststroke, she won the 100/200 freestyle double at the national age group finals at 14.

With her GCSEs coming up, Anderson started boarding at Ellesmere College where the school team – the Titans – are coached by Alan Bircher, an open water and distance freestyler for Britain in his own racing days.

It was a move that Anderson says has done much for her as a person and athlete but even at 15 and cutting a swathe through the junior ranks, the teenager still had a chronic lack of confidence.

That expressed itself one Friday morning when she was so upset that Bircher fished her out of the pool. Such was the extent of her distress that she couldn’t speak but instead had to write down the reason for her tears.

She explains: “I was in year nine and you used to have to get your phones taken off you at night. I kept my iPad which wasn’t allowed and the prefects – the girls that were in year 11 or 10 – saw that I liked someone’s photo on Instagram.

“It all kicked off and it was like ‘Give me your iPad now’ and I got really upset about it. Thinking back on it now it’s hilarious but I was so upset about it I was literally ready to pack my bags and leave.”

Anderson found sanctuary in the water.

“Even if I had a bad day I’d just go in the pool, do my set. You don’t have to talk to anybody if you don’t want to, just focus on yourself. I think that was a good thing, definitely, because you just need minutes to yourself, just to be able to be in the water.”

Her star continued to rise. She became European 100m freestyle junior champion in 2016 and made her international senior debut the following year at the World Championships in Budapest.

Where once she had gazed at the top table occupied by 2008 Olympic champion Federica Pellegrini and Australian sisters Cate and Bronte Campbell, the 16-year-old took her place among them.

She said: “I’ve always been a swimming nerd so when people are walking on poolside I’m like ‘Oh my God, look who it is’. Definitely starstruck and I guess I still do get a bit starstruck. But now my idols are people that I race against it’s definitely changed. It’s fun, I enjoy it.”

She reached two relay finals in Budapest before becoming world junior champion over 100m freestyle weeks later. Upwards she continued with two relay bronzes with Team England at the 2018 Commonwealth Games and then four trips to the podium – including two to the top step – at the European Championships.

In 2019 Anderson was eighth in the 100 free at the World Championships and claimed her first senior global medal with bronze as part of the mixed medley relay. Come December and she won her first individual senior medals with gold in the 100 and 200m freestyle at the European Short-Course (25m) Championships.

While some may struggle to negotiate the sometimes choppy waters of successful junior to senior, there had been no such issue for Anderson. Add in some fine personal bests in early 2020 and it hinted at an exciting year to come – only for Covid-19 to wreak havoc.

The Olympics were pushed back a year although Anderson surprised herself by not panicking but instead she accepted and readjusted.

Part of that adjustment was a move away from Ellesmere College to the National Centre in Bath to be coached by Dave McNulty, who has guided Joanne Jackson, Michael Jamieson, Jazmin Carlin and Siobhan O’Connor to five Olympic medals.

She shares a house with double Olympic silver medallist James Guy – “he makes a good curry and I’ll do a spaghetti bolognese” – drawing on his banks of experience.

“I can talk to him about anything other than swimming – I can talk to him about business stuff, nutrition, anything because he has been through it before. So it’s good to have that mentally there for me.”

Nothing, though, can replace competition and Anderson travelled to Budapest in October for the International Swimming League, a professional competition comprising 10 teams swimming in a short-course (25m) pool.

Anderson competed for London Roar and obliterated the British 200 freestyle record amidst a number of fine swims.

So impressive was she that three-time Olympic champion Rowdy Gaines was moved to tell the ISL that “as she gets older and more mature, Freya Anderson is going to be someone that everybody in the world better be really afraid of. She’s going to be very dangerous next year when we get to Tokyo.”