Champion swimmer inspires delegates

You don’t need talent to be successful, because hard work beats talent, according to British swimmer Karen Pickering, speaking at the Women in Business networking lunch, hosted by Willis Towers Watson and Rushton, at the 2019 Airmic conference.

Pickering told the audience that you can improve many qualities such as physical and mental strength and swimming technique through hard work and determination. She said that talent, if you’re lucky enough to have it, is a head-start but not the only quality needed for success.

“I’m not the most talented swimmer,” she said, “but I realised early on that if I worked hard I got better.”

She recalled that some of her swimming peers would cheat on their training by doing less, which was when she knew she could keep getting better while they slacked off.

“At school I told a teacher that my dream was to go to the Olympic Games. The teacher laughed, but the lesson from that is you have to have selective hearing. People will laugh at your ambitions,” she said.

The champion told the audience about a car accident in her early 20s when she broke her back; after that many people told her she should quit competitive swimming because she would never again be as good as she was before the accident.

Pickering’s response was to ignore that and fight harder than ever to get back to full fitness and back into high-level competitive sport, even if it meant going through pain and anxiety.

That was not the only adversity she faced on her journey. Pickering initially had a coach who was unreceptive to her questions. She said he would often tell them to do things and she would ask why, because she wanted to understand and was interested in knowing more.

The response was an uninspiring “shut up or go away”. So, she said: “I did go away!” She moved to a more innovative coach who did answer her questions and wanted to try new training techniques to keep pushing her onwards and upwards.

In this environment, she said, she was able to keep motivating herself to achieve things beyond what was expected. It meant that she threw up at the end of some training sessions, or tipped tears out of her swimming goggles after a very tough swim.

“But my determination to be a winner meant that when it came to a crucial race against a ‘more talented’ competitor from Australia, I was prepared to give more than she was, and I took the medal home,” she concluded.