Swim scholar Ollie Morgan World’s third fastest in Olympic qualification
PATHWAY TO PARIS – Third year EDCAP scholar Ollie Morgan stunned crowds at the recent British Swimming Championships with a record-breaking swim, securing him a place in the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Ollie’s swimming journey has been one to watch, initially joining the University of Birmingham Swimming Club alongside studying Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences. In his second year, Ollie was recognised for his outstanding performance in the pool and awarded an EDCAP (Elite Dual Career Athlete Pathway) scholarship.
This week, Ollie became the third fastest 100m Backstroke in the world with a time of 52.70 breaking Liam Tancock’s long-standing British record. His attention will now turn to the 200m event taking place this Sunday.
Through the scholarship programme delivered by the Performance Centre, Ollie has received tailored support and access to specialist resources to help progress his swimming career to the next level.
It’s been an incredibly successful year for the swim scholar, with a number of club, University and BUCS records broken.
In April 2023, Ollie became a triple British Champion winning the 50m, 100m, and 200m Backstroke at the British Championships. From this, he then gained his first ever selection to represent Great Britain at the World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka, Japan, securing a ninth place ranking.
At just 20 years old it has been incredible to see Ollie progress from strength to strength, with much owed to Swimming head coach Gary Humpage and his team within the UoB Swimming team.
Speaking on Ollie’s Paris qualification, Gary said: “We are on an incredible journey that started back in October 2021 when Ollie joined us at UOB, I could see he had an incredible talent and had many technical traits of a top class international swimmer.
“Ollie becoming triple British champion last year was an incredible achievement that has only ever been achieved once before. From that point, the Olympics was an achievable goal, and since then we have worked everyday on the details that would take us there and formulated a strategy and race plan for the trials to make the Olympic team.
“We had an idea of what it would take to win at the trials and worked on the race segments that would lead us to that time in training every session.
“To see Ollie race at the Olympic trials was incredible experience and one that I will never forget. We have an incredible team culture within UoB Swimming, the positivity of our team members has really helped in training and competition to achieve incredible results along with the superb support from our MDT team.
“I’d like to thank everyone involved. I am absolutely thrilled for Ollie to achieve what he has worked so hard for.”
