Edinburgh’s Connor Mollison has dipped his toe into ice water swimming and emerged with two gold medals from British Championships.
The 31-year-old photographer, who has been training with the Warrender Baths Masters group and outdoors at Foxlake Adventure Centre, East Lothian, travelled to Cheltenham Lido and turned up trumps in both the 50m backstroke and freestyle events.
Also successful was Edinburgh-born swimmer Dan Wallace, the former Olympic silver medallist and world champion who took the 50m butterfly and 100m freestyle events.
With Dan pipping Connor in the 50m butterfly event it made for an interesting car journey home for the two friends who, last year, were part of a quartet who raised over $200,000 for Ukranian Relief and Cancer Support Charities with a sponsored English Channel swim.
Now, though, the focus for Connor is on ice water swimming.
The one-time Scottish junior squad representative said: “Ice swimming is a fairly new sport with ambitions to one day achieve Winter Olympic status.
“I had been out of competitive swimming for about 10 years when I decided to give it a go as a way back into competing and things worked out well in Cheltenham.
“Rules state that water temperature has to be under five degrees and it was slightly above that but it was still cold and organisers pressed on with the competition.
“Hopefully I’m swim-fit enough to have taken a step towards representing GB having missed out on becoming a Scottish senior internationalist back in the day when it was my goal to compete in a Commonwealth Games.”
With a new challenge ahead of him Connor added: “Part of the exercise is learning how to handle the cold as well as race – it’s a balance – and compared with sitting in cold water muscles can seize up more quickly when racing – something I’ve had to get used to.”
As well as winning the 50m butterfly Dan Wallace finished runner-up in both the 250 and 500m freestyle events.
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