This Girl Can: Millie's story
For the past three weeks television adverts, social media posts and billboards across the land have advertised Sport England’s latest campaign This Girl Can. It’s a sassy celebration of women everywhere no matter how they exercise, how they look, or how sweaty they get.
The national charity, the English Federation of Disability Sport (EFDS) is supporting This Girl Can to ensure more disabled women can get involved in the campaign.
In January, Sport England’s latest Active People Survey was published. It showed that 121,700 fewer disabled people and 125,000 fewer women are regularly taking part in sport. EFDS believes that the results reinforce the importance of understanding and responding to disabled people’s needs and preferences much more effectively.
Campaigns like This Girl Can will play an important role in increasing the numbers of all active women, especially those living with impairments and health conditions.
Millie Bywater, 15, has high hopes for her growing swimming career – she is currently ranked the number one junior in the country over 400m freestyle, 100m breaststroke and 100m backstroke for her S11 class, for those with a visual impairment.
“Three years ago I wasn’t even swimming properly,” she says, in-between one of her five-times-a-week training sessions.
"Now I just want to keep on improving."
Millie – This Girl Can
It’s a Tuesday morning, 04:45, and the alarm clock in Millie Bywater’s bedroom kicks into action.
Rather than doing to typically teenage thing, turning it off and going back to sleep, Millie drags herself out of her bed with one thing on her mind - hitting the swimming pool.
Three years after being spotted at a taster session in Gloucester, Millie is now tipped by some for a place on Team GB’s Paralympics team at Tokyo 2020.
That light at the end of the tunnel is the reason for the early start, every Tuesday, every week.
“Three years ago I wasn’t even swimming properly” Millie now admits. “We used to just go down to the pool for a bit of fun with my family.
“But I then went on a taster day with my school and did a little trail, and they had a couple of coaches in attendance.
“At the end, they gave out leaflets with all sorts of contact information, plus we then got a letter. And my mum contacted them, I then went for a trail with the club and they then told me I could start with them, training twice a week.
“And my hours have just increased since then.”
Five training sessions a week – “three sessions in the pool then one land training session, which is different stretches and exercises to help with my technique” - have helped Millie shoot to the top of the country’s rankings under coach Josh Patterson. She is the best in the land in her class over 400m freestyle, 100m breaststroke and 100m backstroke.
This quick progression is remarkable. Millie's classed as a swimmer with the most profound visual impairment. In Millie’s case she has very little vision in just one of her eyes.
At nine months old she was diagnosed with retinoblastoma, a cancer which affects the retina of young children, in both eyes. Millie had chemotherapy treatment injected into both eyeballs but had her right eye removed on her third birthday. She still has her left eye, but in the words of her mother Becky, “it is caked with tumours.”
As she started her swimming, Millie found herself drifting diagonally in the water, unable initially to master a sense of direction. But with careful coaching, the Gloucester girl has recently improved leaps and bounds.
“I found I was improving all the time, and I’ve always been very comfortable in the water,” she said.
“Swimming is always something I’ve enjoyed, so it has been nice to get increasingly involved in a sport that I liked before but didn’t get to do very often.
“At school, the sport that I used to do was running and so forth, sports which were not what I enjoyed. But I have always found swimming fun and enjoyable, both training and then participating in competitions.”
Her increased levels of participation and enjoyment in the sport connect with the aims of the This Girl Can campaign, which targets getting more women involved in sport and physical activity.
And Millie, who has every chance of making an impression on the international stage, is the perfect example of someone who has made that transformation.
“Prior to getting involved in swimming I wasn’t a particularly active person,” she explains.
“My fitness has improved quite a bit, which wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t gone and joined in.
“It’s also nice to be active, rather than not doing anything active at all. And there are people I see, people I catch up with, every time I go swimming.
“I knew really nothing about competitive swimming before I went on that training day. And I’m sure I would now be a person who didn’t engage much with any form of exercise, had I not fallen into swimming.
“It’s always worth going and getting involved, especially if it’s something you’ve always enjoyed.”
Millie has reaped the benefits of getting involved, and her improved performance has made a noticeable change not just when it comes to her fitness, but also her mindset.
“I race these days, and I suppose I’m more competitive now than I’ve ever been,” she admits.
“I’m always competing these days, whereas before my relationship with swimming wasn’t based on that.
“When it comes to race day I love hitting my target times and putting all the time I’ve spent training into practice.
“My biggest achievement in the pool up to this point is when I swam my first sub-one minute 50m freestyle. It was something I had been aiming for for quite a while – I have now managed it two times in competitions.”
And what now, for the athlete who still has to balance serious training and goal-setting with studying for a raft of GCSEs including History, French and Sociology?
“Now I just want to keep on improving,” she says.
“I’ve been told that if I keep improving the way and I and keep getting my times down that hopefully I can realistically aim for the Tokyo Paralympic Games in 2020. And that was a big surprise, when they told me that!”
Read Millie Bywater and Marc Woods in discussion for World Cancer Day. EFDS would like to thank the Childhood Eye Cancer Trust for their help with this article. Join the conversation and follow @thisgirlcanuk on Twitter and use hashtag #thisgirlcan and 'like it' on Facebook, visit the website on www.thisgirlcan.co.uk and check out the exclusive campaign film previews. If you are an active disabled woman and have a story to tell, please contact Jimmy Smallwood.
