Swimming

With a gold medalist Olympic Game winner and a world record breaker under our belts, Nottinghamshire really does have superb sporting hero swimmers!

Rebecca 'Becky' Adlington, OBE

Becky is a British freestyle swimmer. She won two gold medals at the 2008 Olympic Games in the 400m and 800m, breaking the 19 year-old world record of Janet Evans in the 800m final. Adlington is Britain's first Olympic swimming champion since 1988, the first British swimmer to win two Olympic gold medals since 1908 and Great Britain's most successful Olympic swimmer in 100 years. On 14 December 2008, she was voted third in the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year award and was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 New Year Honours. 

Tom Blower

Tom (1914-1955) was a long-distance swimmer from Hyson Green, Nottingham. He became a world record breaker at the age of 23 and in 1937 earned the nickname 'Torpedo' for swimming the English Channel in 13 hours and 29 minutes. At the time he broke the previous record by a staggering 23 minutes.