The island’s open water swimming champion Carole Laporte was in action again at weekend, winning a bronze at the International Ice Swimming Association’s British Championships.

The event took place at Rother Park near Sheffield where a 25-metre outdoor pool has been created in a large lake which, until 2005, was the Orgreave open cast coalmine.

The St Ninian’s High School languages teacher, who set a new record time for swimming round the island’s coast in 2020, travelled overnight to get to the venue for registration at 8am on Saturday morning.

The event 1,000 metre blue riband event was first up and there was a score to be settled with her GB team mate Sian Clement who had beaten French-born Carole by 41 seconds at the previous GB champs earlier this year and 0.6 seconds at the Europeans in Romania.

This time Sian again held out and beat Carole by 23 seconds, perhaps helped by a rather expensive hi-tech swimsuit.

Hence the age group result followed the same pattern with Carole in second place (unfortunately there were no age group medals as in previous events) and sixth overall.

After the lunchbreak was the 100 metre individual medley - 25 metres of butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and then freestyle.

Even so shortly off the back of the 1km race Carole put in a most impressive performance coming finishing third place overall and first in her age group.

Observers would have been totally unaware that breaststroke is not her preferred discipline, she absolutely aced it with a fast length displaying a long and powerful stroke, perhaps enhanced by the leg kick developed from cross training.

The run of the timetable meant that only 10 minutes later she was back in the frigid water once again, this time for the 50-metre backstroke.

This presented a big ask, competing against fresher swimmers.

Third place in her age group was not what she had anticipated and her time was five seconds down on her previous best.

This was a tough ending to day one of the competition.

The next event for Carole was the 50-metre butterfly on Sunday afternoon.

The previous GB championship in January saw Carole take gold with a time of 41.81 seconds and potentially the world record for her age group, but for the water temperature was slightly above the limit of five degrees.

This year saw the same issue with the water temperature (at 5.7 degrees) so no records were to be broken.

In the event, she lost a little time with a bad turn because of the slippery pontoon and recorded 42.16 seconds.

Her previous gold age group position had to be surrendered to a newcomer and Carole had to settle for silver this year.

So in summary, a good weekend providing some excellent results and yet more competitive experience at the cold end of open water swimming.

Carole takes with her potential tweaks to further improve her performance with Team GB ready for the forthcoming World Championships where age group medals will be awarded.

This takes place in mid-January 2025 at a lake in Molveno in Northern Italy where the current water temperature is already less than five degrees.

Bonne chance Carole.

NIGEL HENDY