'I hated my body': Swimming legend Rebecca Adlington reveals her heartbreak after death of her stillborn daughter

Swimming gold medalist Rebecca Adlington has revealed the heartbreak she went through with her family after the death of her stillborn daughter last year.

The former Olympian told the Sunday Times she 'hated my body' after her third child, Harper, was stillborn at 20 weeks in October.

She also 'couldn't help blaming myself' after finding out her baby had died in the womb at the 20-week scan, before then having to give birth by induced labour.

Adlington, 35, appeared on television screens this summer as a BBC swimming commentator for the Paris Olympics and won gold for the 400m and 800m freestyle in Beijing in 2008 and bronzes in the same events London 2012.

Speaking about the traumatic incident, she said: 'I couldn't help blaming myself. You analyse everything, but I'd done everything by the book — sleeping on my left side, not lying on my back, not eating this and that, no alcohol — and then this still happened.

'It was very hard for me to accept. I'm very logical so I wanted to find out why this had happened, but the post-mortem [in May] showed there was no reason; sometimes things just happen. I have to come to terms with that somehow and stop obsessing about it.'

Adlington's family - husband Andy Parsons, their son Albie, three; and Summer, nine, her daughter from a previous marriage - have planted a cherry tree outside their home in Harper's memory and have her handprint framed on the wall.

The swimmer said both of her children were 'so involved' in the pregnancy, and still talk about their sister in a 'not really sad, emotional way but really matter of factly'.

Adlington, who also suffered a miscarriage at 12 weeks in 2022 after which she was hospitalised with sepsis, revealed her and Parsons had received counselling together and were 'not in a place to get pregnant now'.

She added: 'Afterwards I hated my body because it couldn't keep Harper alive. I felt it had let me down and I didn't look after myself: I wasn't exercising and eating badly.'

'It was only about four months ago I managed to pull myself out of the darkness a bit. I thought, "Right, I have two kids I have to be around for as long as possible." But it's something that will always be here.'

Originally from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, Adlington and Parsons met on dating app Bumble in 2018, two years after the swimmer split from her ex husband Harry Needs. 

Parsons works as a facilities manager, previously working as a sales assistant at Disneyland Paris and a project manager at a property management company.

The couple quickly fell in love and he moved from Liverpool to live with Adlington in Manchester in 2019.

Her return to work as a pundit this summer in the French capital pleased her family. And viewers were charmed by her enthusiastic and deep insights alongside Clare Balding and the former Olympic swimmer Mark Foster.

Adlington was one of the first public figures to be brutally trolled for her appearance after being thrown into the spotlight following her double Olympic triumph in Beijing, a reaction she described as 'baffling'.

Speaking about that period, Britain's most successful female swimmer said: 'I was like: "Guys, I'm not trying to be a model." Nobody said I need to be pretty to swim, the two just don't combine. I don't need to be stick thin. I need to be strong. I need to be powerful. I need to get my body through the water in the most efficient sense. It's not to do with who looks good in a bikini.'

Since retiring from the sport in 2012, Adlington now swims purely for pleasure with her main focus being the Swim Stars programme, which to date has taught swimming to 8,000 children across the country.

More than 1,000 municipal pools have recently closed - with a further 1,500 at risk of going under - leaving one in four primary school children unable to swim.

Adlington's programme is looking to 'bridge this gap' and 'invest in facilities and build our own because we can't keep demanding councils who don't have the funds'.

Although swimming and water safety are on the national curriculum, Ofsted does not censure schools that fail to teach them.

'And how can they when for some the nearest pool is 20 miles away? You cannot expect a school to transport the kids all that way on a bus and back again to do an hour's swimming,' she added.

According to the Royal Life Saving Society, there was an 85 per cent increase in child drownings in the UK between 2019 and 2022, a statistic that worries Adlington.

'Right now, we are failing our kids. So many people associate swimming with sport and think 'Oh well, I don't need to do that', but you absolutely need the skills for safety,' she said.