There are things no one tells you about what will happen when you quit being an elite athlete. The first? “That the perfect race will haunt you forever,” writes former swimming champion Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell in the opening of her memoir, . “That when it’s over for you it’s over, immediately.
Just like that. That you’ll shred your cartilage into nothing after so many years of repetition and wake up in the night years later dripping in sweat with your shins on fire, phantom pains shooting through your hips. That you’ll lose your mind and you won’t realise until it’s truly gone.
” Rewind to August 2009: a 15-year-old Rebecca has just become the world number one in the 50m. (“‘Black people don’t swim,’ they said,” she recalls in her memoir. “‘Black people can’t swim.
’ Well, fuck you, I thought.”) In 2010, she became the first Black woman to represent Great Britain at the European Championships, and won the 50m and 100m breaststroke at the British championships. Yet two years later – with the 2012 London Olympics in touching distance – she walked away from it all.
“I needed to walk away – I had to. Staying until I couldn’t win anymore felt like a death sentence.” It’s match day in Highbury, north London, and Ajulu-Bushell, 30, has chosen her local pub as a meeting spot.
Dressed in Paloma Wool cashmere, she looks a little out of place sipping a bloody Mary in the sea of red-faced Arsenal fans. Still, she’s at ease with .
