Why Synchronised swimming is no laughing matter

Jasmine Gardner
26 Jul 2010

Anyone who ever giggled while watching synchronised swimming would be stunned into silence if they had to attempt just one day of 21-year-old Jenna Randall's training schedule.

Eight hours a day, six days a week in the water — four hours before and four hours after lunch.

Before the morning session is an hour of stretching and core strengthening in the gym and her “lunch break” consists of a two-hour gym session working on power and strength exercises.

The worst bit of all comes two weeks before a competition, when she has to practise her routines for hours at a time with 3kg weight belts strapped to her waist and ankles.

“Most people are sick at the end of it and you feel like you're drowning,” she admits.

Just thinking about it is enough to make most people reach for the nearest bottle, but unlike most young people, Jenna doesn't drink.

“I'm probably not like a normal 21-year-old going to university who is enjoying life, having a few drinks and partying,” she says. “If you've trained for a week and then you decide to get drunk at the weekend then that's your whole week of training just gone out the window. There's really no point.”

When she places her hand on her heart (which she does often when talking about her commitment to synchronised swimming) and says: “For me, I want to achieve so much in my sport and I would never sacrifice that just for a couple of drinks”, there is not so much as a flicker of doubt in her eyes.

Growing up in Camberley, Surrey, Jenna still lives with her mother and father in their ample, gated home. From the house, her father runs two building companies that he and Jenna's mother set up in their twenties.

Jenna first began synchronised swimming aged seven — attracted to the sport because her older sister, Tia (now 25 and retired from professional competitions), had already taken it up and was showing promise. At 13 Jenna joined Team GB and at 17 she quit her AS-levels in sports science and business studies to dedicate herself to the sport completely.

These days, her younger sister,20-year-old Asha, is also on the GB synchro team for London 2012 and has been acting as Jenna's reserve in the duet event while Jenna has been recovering from a back injury.

Nothing less than this stress fracture would have got Jenna out of the pool. “If we're ill, we train,” she says. “Our coach says, If you're not on your death bed, you turn up to the pool and you train'. You just have to suck it up.”

Along with only seeing her friends and boyfriend once a week, missing friends' 21st birthday celebrations in Las Vegas and never eating chocolate (“synchro is about reputation and how you look as well, so we need to be quite lean and toned. When I see my parents eating a pudding at the dinner table I have to walk away”), time off for illness is just another sacrifice Jenna makes for her sport.

“Synchronised swimming has literally been my life. This is what I've known, so it's normal life to me,” she says.

In fact it's her mother Nari, zipping around the cream-coloured kitchen cooking a roast for the family as Jenna sits (legs tucked under her, back rigid) on the sofa, who has the outsider's perspective of just how much has gone into her three daughters' synchro careers. “They give up their lives, really,” says Nari. And so has she — spending every spare moment driving the girls to training and competitions.

“My mum used to spend hours and hours sewing on sequins to our costumes,” says Jenna — costumes which cost about £700 each. She owns more than 20.

In 2007, the GB synchronised swimming team finally secured better funding from UK Sport and now Jenna receives £12,000 a year. But while the team is sponsored by British Gas, Jenna has no individual sponsorship, so has no additional income.

Before 2007, Jenna's parents were paying up at every juncture — they even built a £75,000 “synchro specific” pool in their back garden because local pools were unavailable for bookings at suitable times. Often, at just a maximum of six foot deep, they were also too shallow for synchronised swimming, which requires that the girls never touch the bottom of the pool.

Nari estimates the family's spending on synchro to have exceeded £100,000. “All the private coaching, clubs, the swimming costumes, the travelling backwards and forwards, the swimming caps that go mouldy. Nose clips are only a couple of quid but are going all the time. It's £100,000 plus, definitely.” She buys shampoo in bulk.

But for Jenna and her family, the hardest sacrifices haven't been monetary. Jenna lists missing the funeral of her best friend's father “because obviously I had to train” as one of “the things I really regret”.

And, just before the qualifiers for the Beijing Olympics, at which Jenna and her partner Olivia Allison ranked 14th, Jenna's father was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma — a kind of blood cancer.

“The sad thing was that we couldn't tell Jenna,” says Nari. “If she wasn't emotionally strong enough she wouldn't have qualified and they wouldn't have gone to Beijing in 2008.” The family broke the news to Jenna when she returned and fortunately, although at risk of relapse, he has since recovered.

But there is one thing that, through all the sacrifices, keeps Jenna going. “2012 is the big pressure because it's in our country and no one ever gets to experience this more than once in their life.” She touches her hand to her heart. “For Olivia and me, we want an Olympic medal. That is our goal.”