Team Captains’ Report: TIP Paris 4th – 5th June 2022

A team of 25 swimmers from OTS travelled to Paris for the 16th TIP. This tournament has been a favourite for many years and was especially important this year, being the first LGBT swim meet in Europe post pandemic.

European Masters swimmers have been slower returning to training and several we spoke to mentioned the continuing reluctance of their team-mates to compete and travel. In this respect Out to Swim people are incredibly fortunate to have the venues and coaches enabling us to be competition ready. I hope that we have been an example to encourage our friends.

It was amazing to catch up with old friends from past competitions and find that the old camaraderie is still there. Some may remember Jerome who swam with us for many years and now lives in Nice. He brought 3 others from his team.

We did not win all the medals but our strong relay teams ensured that everyone came home with at least one. The tally was: Gold – 65, Silver – 17, Bronze 13. Each member of a relay team received a medal.

We had great fun working out the relay teams over coffee in trendy Shoreditch. Sadly, Brendon and Richard had to cancel at the last minute due to circumstances beyond their control. Thanks to Paul Mc, Hubba, Dermot and Rhys for coming to our rescue and it all paid off on the day. The highlight was the 10 x 50m freestyle relay at the end of the meet. We presented two teams led by Isabelle and Danny. They theoretically, had equal times so it was an incredibly exciting race. It turned out that several of the youngsters had underestimated their times and or swam their fastest ever so that Danny’s team were the clear winners. The results, however revealed that the combined ages of each team were different, so all were winners. A great result.

Michael Jennings (The Coach) was a great support rallying those staying in the Hostel, making sure everyone got to their race and providing feedback. There was some very fine swimming over the two days and there were also some exciting discoveries with some of our new, younger swimmers. It was also a delight to see others returning to competitive swimming.

Our chair of swimming (Danny) arranged our social activities for the weekend, ensuring that we were all fed and watered for the following day. Muscling in on the Water Polo party apparently went well, so with not much sleep, some struggled with 400 Freestyle on Sunday morning. Apparently (based on the WhatsApp thread) the final night party was another success.