Paris 2024 and future stars to serve up festive treat at Winter Championships

Spectators are set for an early festive treat as a host of Paris 2024 stars take on the nation’s best up and coming swimmers at the GoCardless Swim England National Winter Championships.

Sheffield’s Ponds Forge hosts the Championships and Swim England’s final national event of 2024, where more than 1300 swimmers will be in action across the four days.

Amongst those entrants are a number of those that represented Team GB in Paris with Olympians including Freya Colbert, Alex Cohoon, Laura Stephens and Eva Okaro rounding out their calendar year with some exciting short course racing.

City of Salford swimmer Amelie Blocksidge also heads to South Yorkshire, ahead of competing as part of Aquatics GB’s squad for her first World Championships next week.

Para swimming will once again be a part of this year’s Championships after being implemented into the competition for the first time in 2023.

A number of Paralympians will be competing across 12 events throughout the four days with Paris 2024 champions Will Ellard, Poppy Maskill and Olivia Newman-Baronius each looking to end 2024 with more gold to their names.

Tickets are still available for anyone wanting to watch the action in Sheffield and can be purchased either on venue or online until 7pm on Wednesday evening via this link.

Summer Meet stars looking to impress

Each day will have three sessions, with the first heats beginning at 8:30am on Thursday morning.

Distance swimming will then headline the afternoon sessions, with the 1500m or 800m freestyle heats taking place from 2:20pm each day, before the lights come down for finals at 5pm each evening.

All individual events will have A, B and Junior finals, except for the 800m and 1500m freestyle, which will be heat declared winner events as we crown both our National Winter and Junior Champions.

Some of those in the hunt for the junior medals includes a number of swimmers that impressed at the GoCardless Swim England National Summer Meet earlier this year.

Jessica Huggins, Alexander Tew, Thomas Swales and Sophie Martin all came away with a hat trick of golds from this pool back in the summer and will be targeting more success in South Yorkshire.

Every session will be live streamed on the Swim England YouTube channel and the links will be available on the ‘Live Swimming’ page.

The results of the GoCardless Swim England National Winter Championships 2024 can be found here and event photography will be taken by Will Johnston Photography.