LONDON, Aug 11- Sharron Davies will never forget the thrill of swimming at the Olympics as a 13-year-old and is sure Chinese sensation Yu Zidi will have felt similar excitement as the youngest world championships medallist at 12.
The pre-teen prodigy made headlines when she took bronze with her country’s 4x200m freestyle relay team in Singapore last month.
Sharron Davies swam for Britain at 11 and made her Olympic debut in Montreal in 1976. At 14, she twice won bronze at the European championships and by 15 was a double Commonwealth Games champion.
While some have raised questions about safeguarding, mental health, stress and the ethics of someone competing at elite level while still so young, Davies saw no reason to be concerned.
“I don’t have any particular qualms,” she told Reuters in a telephone interview.
“It didn’t traumatise me. In fact, when you’re young, people presume that this is going to make you extremely nervous but in fact the opposite happens.
“You know that every time you get into the water you’re going to swim faster, because you’re just growing and getting better at 12 and you have the next 10 years in front of you.”
Davies compared that to the stress of being an older athlete in their last major meet and knowing that one final race, maybe only seconds in the pool, could be life-changing.
Yu’s experience, she suggested, will have been very different.
“That 12-year-old thought this was just ‘everything is a bonus, I’m just having the best time ever…’ the pressure is not there,” she said. “At 12, you just don’t even think about that. You just think about how amazing it is to be part of this.”
Davies, who won 400m Individual Medley silver at the 1980 Moscow Olympics at a time when doped East German swimmers dominated the pool, said she was “on cloud nine” at making the Olympic squad.
“I just thought everything was amazing. I was just so lucky to be there and to experience it all and just to be part of it,” she explained.
“There was nothing for me to lose and everything to gain. And it would have been the same for her (Yu Zidi).”
Davies said age limits, with 14 the usual entry point for less elite performers, were meaningless when such an obvious talent came along.
“If someone is good enough to be there, how do you say ‘Well, you can’t come?’,” she asked. “I think if someone is good enough, it’d be very unfair to take her moment away.
“God forbid something terrible happened to her and she tripped and broke her leg or something next year and it ruined her career. And she never had that opportunity when she was good enough.
“So I think it’s a tough one to say she shouldn’t have been there. It didn’t mark me. It certainly didn’t mark (diver) Tom Daley. From personal experience, the pressure comes later in life not early.”
Daley, the 2020 Olympic 10m synchro gold medallist, was 14 when he competed for Britain in the 2008 Olympics — younger than Yu Zidi will be if she competes at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.
Sharron Davies broke both her arms at 11 falling out of a tree and then resumed training in the pool with plaster casts wrapped in plastic bags. Much has changed in a more professional era.
“I think that we have a lot more medical attention now than we used to have,” she said. “They understand rest breaks as well, whereas we just didn’t get those. We were lucky if we got three weeks off a year.
“Nowadays they will say to some of the more senior athletes, ‘go and take a year off, take six months off, go just be normal for a little while and come back hungry again’. None of those things happened back in my day, sadly.
“So I think we’ve learned a lot of lessons.”
