Swimming: Dickons feels right at home in Bath

Dec 17 2010 The Journal

IT’S 300 miles from Stockton-on-Tees to Bath but there are plenty of reasons for Jess Dickons to feel at home in a city that takes even its name from a 2,000-year association with aquatic pursuits.

Not least the North East accents of Dave McNulty and Graeme Antwhistle, respectively head coach and assistant coach at British Swimming’s Intensive Training Centre (ITC).

“I’m one of the few swimmers who can understand what they are saying,” jokes Dickons, one of 13 swimmers in the elite Bath ITC squad.

“I have worked with Dave and Graeme before so I knew what they were like when I came here.”

In fact it was Antwhistle who steered Dickons and her old training partner Jemma Lowe to their early international successes when he was head coach at Borough of Stockton.

In the same era McNulty was a few miles down the road at Derwentside, where he guided first Nicola Jackson and then her sister Jo to world and Olympic success.

The mid-2000s were also heady days for the Stockton contingent, especially 2006.

At the European Junior Championships in Majorca that year, Dickons and Lowe respectively won gold and silver in the 200m butterfly with Lowe winning a second silver in the 100m fly and Dickons a silver in the 400m individual medley.

A month later Lowe collected one silver and two bronze medals at the inaugural World Youth Championships in Brazil.

But the years since then have brought rather different fortunes for the former Stockton butterfly double-act.

While Lowe surged to a sixth place in the 2008 Olympic 100m butterfly final, Dickons’ plans to join her in Beijing were hampered by an injury known in the trade as butterflier’s back.

“In 2007 I had a stress fracture of the lumber spine,” she said. “But it hadn’t fractured right through so it could have been worse.”

Dickons managed to avoid surgery but was unable to train for several months and could not race for almost a year.

Many 17-year-olds would have been tempted to quit in such circumstances but Jess insists she never even considered it.

“I always knew I would come back,” she said. “I trained so hard to try and make the Olympic team but for some reason I peaked a week after the trials.”

Her belated form won Dickons her first medal at a senior international championship – bronze in the 200m butterfly at the short-course World Championships in Manchester.

“That was a massive achievement for me and a consolation after not making the Olympic team,” she said.

In the inevitable post-Olympic reshuffle, as Antwhistle and McNulty headed for the new Bath ITC and Lowe for the University of Florida, Dickons relocated to Edinburgh to train under coach Fred Vergnoux.

But within two months he too was off to his native France, and Dickons followed.

“I really liked his training and I swam in Paris for almost a year,” she said. “But it was hard financially and the training wasn’t really working for me so I decided to come to Bath.”

Dickons says she is pleased with her progress since then. Within weeks of arriving in the city of Roman baths, she was heading for Rome itself for the 2009 World Championships. A year later Delhi was the destination after she made England’s Commonwealth Games team, then came seventh in the 200m butterfly.

“I had had a pretty rough season with injuries and stuff but I wanted to make the qualifying time so badly and I did,” she said. “Then after the heats in Delhi, I was totally buzzing. I knew I wasn’t going to swim a PB, but I was so happy to make the final.

“I think those five or six weeks – the England training camp in Doha, the Games in Delhi and the week after – were the best of my life. As I’ve grown up, I’ve learnt to appreciate it more.”

This year Dickons is hoping for a summer trip to China – either to the World Championships in Shanghai in July or the World University Games in Shenzhen the following month.

“Shanghai is not out of the question for me but Jemma and Ellen Gandy are two and three seconds ahead of me right now,” she said. “I will have a go but I would be happy to make the uni games.”

Meanwhile, Dickons’ career appears to be converging with Lowe once again following her best friend’s 100m butterfly bronze medal for Wales in Delhi and subsequent decision to quit Florida and relocate to one of British Swimming’s other four ITCs at Swansea. But for both the former Stockton girls, the ultimate sharing experience would to be in the British team for London 2012.