VALE swimmers Macey French (ten), Rachel Egan (ten) and Toby Vale (11) competed at the recent Ickle People Open held at Wolverhampton Central Baths and the trio put in fine performances across many events to return home with medals galore.
In the ten-year-old girls’ category, Pershore’s Macey bagged a total of seven age group medals and finished as the seventh ranked girl across all age groups in the competition – quite a remarkable achievement when you consider there were a total of 95 girls taking part.
Macey took gold in both the 100m backstroke and 100m fly, silver in the 200m freestyle, the 50m backstroke and 50m fly and bronze in the 50m fly and 200m IM.
In her less favoured event, the breaststroke, she finished fifth in the 50m and seventh in the 100m, which demonstrates her improvement in this stroke and bodes well for the future.
Competing in the same age group as Macey was Evesham’s Rachel. Having only turned ten a few days before the open, the going was tough for Rachel as one of the youngest competitors in her age group.
However, she still performed well with top ten finishes in the 200m IM, the 50m fly, 200m freestyle, 50m backstroke and the 50m freestyle.
Evesham’s Toby, swimming in the boys’ 11-year-old age group, returned home with nine medals as he bagged a staggering eight golds and one silver.
His gold medals came in the 200m freestyle, 50m backstroke, 100m breaststroke, 50m freestyle, 100m IM, 50m fly, 50m breaststroke and the 100m freestyle and his silver came in the 100m backstroke.
Toby also finished as the third ranked boy across all age groups in the competition – third out of 71 makes very good reading indeed. Toby also set three new personal bests, with his best coming in the 200m freestyle which saw him take eight seconds off his previous PB set only a couple of months previously.
The 2015 Worcestershire County Championships beckon for all three swimmers with many times already attained and other times within touching distance.
Both Pershore and Evesham Swimming Club would like to wish all three swimmers every success in their pursuit of more success in the future.