A brutal combat sport may not be the obvious choice for a swimmer who wants to spend a few months out of the water but for Stephen Clegg, five months of jujitsu was exactly what he needed to reset his mind and energise his body following a bruising Tokyo 2020 Paralympics campaign.
Clegg’s haul of a silver and two bronze medals in Tokyo three years ago would be deemed a success by most athletes but for the Edinburgh man, who’d pinned his hopes on winning his first Paralympic title, his hat-trick of medals was little consolation for missing out on gold.
A break from swimming ensued, with Clegg throwing himself into the entirely new sport of jujitsu in an attempt to rejuvenate himself – and his plan worked perfectly.
Clegg returned to the pool in early 2022 with an entirely new mindset which, he believes, spurred him on to a new level.
“After Tokyo, I spent four or five months trying sports that I’d never done before – I wanted to get back to just enjoying sport so I could work out how to translate that back into swimming,” he says.
“The key sport I tried was jujitsu and I really enjoyed being a novice at something again.
“It also helped me approach my swimming training differently – it became about skills development rather than just working as hard as possible in the pool. There’s been a mental shift in terms of what hard work looks like so it’s now about working smarter and not just necessarily harder.”
Clegg is one of 26 swimmers in GB’s squad for the Paris Paralympics, with his fellow Scots Louis Lawlor, Toni Shaw and Faye Rogers also included.
With Paris being the 28-year-old’s third Paralympic Games, he’s one of the most experienced British swimmers competing in the French capital and his experience will, he hopes, stand him in good stead, with several valuable lessons learned from his previous Paralympic appearances.
“I’m trying to avoid putting pressure on myself in Paris because going into Tokyo, I had a lot of expectations and I wanted to come home with very specific results and medals and I think that was, ultimately, my downfall,” he says.
“In Tokyo, I attached all the progress I’d made in both a personal and a professional capacity on a certain race, which was the 100m fly. I felt that if I didn’t win that, it meant everything I’d done in the previous seven years was for nothing and I was a failure. That was a really unhealthy way of looking at it because regardless of my results, the progress I’d made as both a person and as an athlete was a big success story in itself.”
In Paris, Clegg, who is visually impaired, will begin his campaign today and will race the S12 100m backstroke, freestyle and butterfly over the next week. And while he’s adamant he won’t be putting an undue amount of pressure on himself over the coming days, as reigning world champion in the S12 100m backstroke, he admits he’s still striving for the top step of the podium in at least one of his events.
“It’d be naïve to say I’m going into Paris without expectations to win - I’m a competitor so I want to win every time I get into the pool,” he says.
“But I’ve had to drastically change my relationship with the sport in that I’ve had to stop attaching my self-worth to my results and that’s been a big factor in me being able to accept any bad performances. And because of that, the enjoyment has been far greater this Paralympic cycle.”
Clegg may be one of Scotland’s most successful para-athletes in recent times, but he’s still not the most successful athlete in his own family.
His elder brother, James, was a medallist in the pool at the London 2012 Paralympics while his elder sister, Libby, is a two-time Paralympic champion and five-time Paralympic medallist on the track.
This will be Clegg’s first Paralympic Games at which his sister is not also a member of the British team but with her in Paris as a pundit, Clegg won’t have far to look if he’s in need of support.
And he admits that while there’s no serious rivalry between the pair when it comes to medal tallies, he is well aware he could surpass her Paralympic medal count over the coming days.
“There’s a little bit of competition between me and my sister because I’ve got an opportunity to surpass her medal tally in Paris, he says.
“It’d be cool to do that but there’s no real rivalry between us and it’s always been nice to have them in the family because it’s helped me navigate and deal with certain situations I’ve been in as an athlete.”
