There’s a version of her story that Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell has learned to tell. One that’s abridged, and feels safe to share; blurred round the edges. “What I do for work today,” she begins, “requires a lot of public speaking. I’m used, therefore, to telling a light version of my history. One for inspiration, or whatever. How I’ve had a lot of experience of being the outsider: the only one, the first. I was the first Black woman to swim for Great Britain; the only Black person in my year doing my degree at Oxford University. I’m often the sole Black woman in the corporate rooms that I’m in today. That bit is easy – the top line, and quite divorced from me.”
It’s Friday lunchtime in her literary agent’s airy West End office. A copy of her new memoir, These Heavy Black Bones, sits on the table between us. It documents the dedication demanded of a young athlete; the sacrifice and strain that comes with competing at the highest of levels. It’s vulnerable and exposing. She’s 30 now. Half her lifetime ago, at the age of 15, Ajulu-Bushell was ranked as the top short-course 50m female breaststroker internationally, of any age. In the run up to London 2012, aged 17, at what should have been the pinnacle of her swimming career, Ajulu-Bushell walked away from her sport, never to return. She writes of the toll it took to be the first; the cost of chasing peak performance. “Speaking about the detail feels more like shaky ground,” she says, tentatively. “I’m still not sure I feel ready. Part of me just wants to run away.”
For most of the intervening years, she resolved not to return to these sporting experiences. “Then Covid happened and everyone felt the world was ending. You revisited things. And I was in the midwest of America at the time working on a PhD, which I never finished. George Floyd was murdered, not that far away. The Black Lives Matter movement reemerged. Alice Dearing had just qualified for the Tokyo 2021 – the first Black woman to swim for TeamGB at an Olympic Games. It had been 10 years since I stopped. Articles were written that talked about me: that I was going to be the first before I quit the Olympic team. My name being in the press again was a reminder of something I’d put behind me.”
Ajulu-Bushell did a TV interview with Sky Sports that same year, for Black History month. “I talked about how racism still exists in all sports at elite level and in mine specifically.” Soon, she began writing. “I’ve always wanted to write,” she says, “and this felt the place to start.” A novel in the works already, long term, she hopes to write fiction. “First I wanted to suck the poison out, to see if I could.”
From an early age, the signs of Ajulu-Bushell’s future success were there. “Swimming always felt easier than walking,” she says. “At school in Nairobi – I would have been six – I had this great swimming teacher. She wrote in my reports: ‘Rebecca will be a swimming star of the future.’” Her first competition was a small inter-school gala. She won every race she entered. “I went home and drew a picture of a little brown girl in a swimming costume with a comically large gold medal around her neck. ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘this is me when I win the Olympics.’”
Born in Warrington, it was in Nairobi that Ajulu-Bushell spent the longest stretch of her childhood. Her mother and stepfather were humanitarian aid workers, which meant regular relocation. There were stints in Uganda, Malawi and South Africa, alongside the Kenyan capital. When she was 10, the family landed in Cape Town. “I had these two crazy Eastern Bloc coaches,” she says, “and much more resources than in Kenya. The swimming stepped up, hugely. It becomes your whole life overnight. The hours-in are astounding. You need these hours in a pool to train your body to develop in a certain way. No one sits you down to sign away your childhood. Suddenly, you’re in a world where the intensity and sacrifice are normalised entirely.”
When Ajulu-Bushell was 13, her parents planned a return to Nairobi. “I couldn’t keep my training up there,” she says, “and my parents realised their lives couldn’t fit five more years of my schedule. I was sent to a boarding school in Plymouth. There are lots of sports schools in the UK, set up to create mini high-performance centres for children. I was on this really intense swimming programme.” About 24 children, aged 13-18, lived and trained together. “My childhood was in East and South Africa,” she says. “I was barefoot, climbing trees with no makeup. Then I arrived in Devon, 2007. The culture shock? It was insane.” Then came the swimming.
The daily routine: alarms went off at 4.45 every morning. In the pool from 5:15am, they’d swim for two and a half hours. “We’d do 8 to 10km,” she explains, “before heading to school for breakfast. We’d eat as much as possible. We were burning so many calories that we were starving, all the time.” After a day spent in classes with the wider year group, they returned, again, to training. “Another two-hour session. Then dinner at school, an hour of weights and gym training, before going back to the boarding house for homework, packing and unpacking, endless costume drying. By the time you were done, it was past 11pm. Then at 4.45am you’d start it all again.”
And if you fancied a lie in?
“No no no,” she interrupts. “That doesn’t happen. You never miss training. Never. If you did miss the morning, you weren’t allowed to train in the evening. It sounds like a reverse punishment, but that’s what we feared. I don’t know if this is real, but it felt like it at the time: every session out of the pool, you lose feel for the water. You’re looking for 0.4 of a second gain on your time: the difference between winning and coming fourth. Every second counts.”
Of all the sessions Ajulu-Bushell vividly describes, one sticks out specifically. “I was 13 or 14 when I was training and my knee, I think, came out of its socket. It hurt like hell.” She dragged herself to the water’s edge in silence. “In the same way we don’t miss training, the idea of getting an injury was horrifying. I sat on the side of the pool and pushed my knee back into the socket. In hindsight, it’s quite mad.” Pushing to these extremes, she feels, wasn’t unique to her experience.
“It’s more than an open secret,” she says. “It’s almost an expectation. A lot of people I know swam through horrific injuries and eating disorders. We would train until we threw up. Then we’d get back in and carry on. And a lot of the hardcore stuff was, if not celebrated, then made light of. As kids, we found ways to make it normal.” How intended all this is, she suggests, is up for debate. “But the way you train isn’t just designed to challenge your body. It’s designed to mould your mind. Not just to give you an acceptance of discomfort, but to make you, almost, like it.” This was the mid-2000s. “It’s not that long ago. And even in the years since, I’m not sure how much elite sport has changed in what it expects from child athletes.”
This pressurised culture wasn’t confined to the pool. “Food cupboards were locked in the kitchen so we couldn’t get at it – a lot of hyper-vigilance around food, especially as the girls got older. I didn’t start my period until I was 16, because my body fat levels were so low. Half naked on the poolside, a constant interrogation of your body; weighed on scales, tested for fat levels in front of your peers, what you’re eating watched every day. I won’t say it was normal, but it wasn’t specific to where I was training.”
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She writes of having her privacy and autonomy stripped through this period of adolescence. In the world of young elite athletes, she says, “There’s a lot of bullying. It’s definitely used as a training tactic in some places. Elsewhere, it’s just designed to humiliate. We put our bodies through an awful lot of trauma.” She was 14 when she started weight training. The result? “I’m relatively short, have flat feet, and still wake up in the middle of the night with phantom pains shooting from my hips down to my knees. Listening to coaches screaming at swimmers was normal. At the end of the first chapter, I write about a coach commenting on how our costumes don’t shrink after returning from the summer holidays. For young women that stuff can be very traumatic – and it happened regularly.”
Alongside this intense training regime, Ajulu-Bushell was dealing with another strain: more often than not, she was the only person of colour in these spaces. “My mum is white. My dad was Black Kenyan. I’d grown up in Africa, with Blackness all around me. It wasn’t, therefore, particularly interrogated.” Then she arrived in Devon. “I write a lot in the book about not understanding or wanting to accept my relationship with Blackness in the very white world around me.”
Context here is key. “It’s not true,” she says, “that Black people can’t or don’t swim, but that’s a prevailing mythology. There’s pseudoscience: that our bones are heavier; that we can’t float; that our muscle density is higher. Then there’s generational and cultural trauma in the Black community around swimming and water safety. There’s a history of Black bodies drowning in the Atlantic through the slave trade.” But she was raised across the African continent. “I grew up swimming with Black and brown people in Kenya and South Africa, so that never really rang true to me. And I was also pretty good myself.”
As her rankings climbed, and Olympic promise grew, journalists became interested in this frontier-breaking narrative. “I’m so proud of my Black identity now,” she says, “but I never felt that at the time. It came with micro-aggressions, comments and ignorance; those small ways children are racist to the person who is different all the time. Nothing I hold against any of them; what was in the press was far more punishable. One article at the time said: ‘She speaks with a cut-glass British accent.’ I didn’t want to be known as the Black swimmer. I wanted to be the best swimmer. Which I was, for a while. In spite of being Black.”
No single event made Ajulu-Bushell hang up her towel. “There’s no crescendo moment. I just wanted it all to stop. I wanted silence. No more press. Nobody looking at my developing body. I wanted it all to go away.” The 2010 Commonwealth Games hadn’t gone to plan; she’d placed last in her 100m event. “I come back,” she says, “and I’m so tired of all the stakeholders in my success. My body feels like a vessel through which everyone else will realise their dreams.” There’d been talk of her dropping out of school to swim full-time. Academia, like everything beyond swimming, had long taken a back seat: on the eve of her sitting her GCSE exams, reporters had been invited into the school to interview the swimmers. “And what if I did drop out of school and mess up my A-levels? Whether or not I made the podium, I decided it wasn’t worth it. I quit.”
So her future took a different path. Studying fine art at Brasenose College, Oxford. Post-graduation, she spent time in Paris. She made films, worked in comms and started that PhD, before taking on her current job – chief executive of the 10,000 Interns Foundation, tasked with transforming workplaces for underrepresented talent.
One detail, I say, stood out when I read her book. How, despite being part of a wider school community, there was a swimmer-specific boarding house – on a different site – where she and the other young athletes lived separately. “It kept us away,” she says, “from the normality of adolescence and teenage-hood. I call it a panopticon – they were always watching us. When you start to deliberately draw parameters around a group, isolating them from their peers, it’s how you can really start shaping and influencing their lives. How much control can be exerted over their existence. At that age, your schema is yet to fully develop. Put a kid into that system really young and tell them this is what to do, after a few years that’s all they know. Maybe that’s the structure that’s needed. The magic ingredients to make the best elite athletes; blinkers that disincentive you from looking at anything peripheral beyond your lane.” Are the results worth it?
She compares it to the ethics of the entertainment industry’s creation of often ill-fated child stars. “That same lens hasn’t been brought to professional sport,” she believes, “because there’s a perceived purity around sport, which stops it blending with that Hollywood conversation. There isn’t money being exchanged in the same way, it’s not seen as work. Kids are amateur athletes. And that’s true, until you take sponsorship. But it’s an investment nonetheless. There are those same stories. Tragic endings for ex-young athletes. Nobody wants to corrupt or pollute the world of sport with these complicated questions.”
With just months before the Paris Olympic Games begins, wider discussions about the human cost of elite sports are once again emerging. Before I even ask the question, Ajulu-Bushell knows what’s coming. “One of the reasons I didn’t write about all these experiences for so long,” she says, “is because I thought, if I did, I needed an answer to that. It’s like when I was 16 and was asked, constantly: ‘What do we do to get Black people to swim?’ I was like, ‘I’m a child, I don’t fucking know.’”
“We need to keep pushing for reform, and checks and balances, in these spaces,” she says. “Are we going to do away with elite sport? No, it’s too powerful. I don’t want us to. The Olympics is this incredible bastion of resistance and humanity. I don’t think the human race will stop trying to push beyond the boundaries and records set generations before us. But surely we can find safer ways to do it. The media has to answer for the pressure it puts on young athletes. Safeguarding institutions within sport need reform.”
There’d been talk of our photoshoot taking place at the Aquatics Centre in east London’s Olympic Park, home of the 2012 games. Ajulu-Bushell declined; she’s still never been, despite now living in its vicinity. She doesn’t swim today. “No, never,” she says. “On holiday, maybe, but I don’t get in the pool. There’s no reason to. Plus, it’s quite antisocial to go to public swimming sessions and swim really, really fast.”
“And swimming was an addiction,” she says, “a perfect high. When I quit, what I was most scared of was not getting that feeling again. So lots of these bizarre sacrifices, or things that feel sinister. It’s in the context of this prize that was like ecstasy. It’s a tension. It felt heartbreaking to write down so much of what’s in the book.” She looks down at my copy, still conflicted, “because even now I’d do it all again for that high, in all honesty.”
These Heavy Black Bones by Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell is published on 6 June by Canongate at £18.99