How Cohoon went from rugby hopeful to Olympic swimmer

Alex Cohoon is part of Team GB's 4x100m freestyle relay team for Paris 2024

Alex Cohoon was a teenager when he side-stepped a potential rugby career and decided to try and make a splash in the pool.

He puts the shift in sporting ambitions down to a growth spurt.

By the age of 17, a place in Gloucester's academy and dreams of playing in the Premiership no longer fitted him.

In the pool, however, he was a part-time swimmer with giant potential to try and grow into.

Now aged 21, standing 6ft 5in (1.95m), with a wing span of about 7ft and weighing in at 93kg, Cohoon is heading to the Paris Olympic Games as part of Team GB.

"There was one point where I did put all my eggs in the rugby basket and I did want to be a rugby player," Cohoon told BBC Radio Leicester.

But the life of a fledgling rugby player, who floated between playing fly-half and centre, wasn't for Cohoon.

"The set-up, environment and the travel, as Gloucester wasn't that local for me, was too much," he said.

"I also had a growth spurt, so swimming was the next step for me, so I decided to take all my eggs out of the rugby basket and put them in the swimming basket."

Before that, he was in secondary school and juggling rugby training with swimming sessions.

When Cohoon finally decided to focus his attention on the pool, he was still only hitting the water four times a week at Cirencester, a small swimming club in the neighbouring Gloucestershire village of Fairford where he grew up.

"It was quite late," says Cohoon when he talks about deciding to take swimming seriously.

"I got to 16 or 17 and had a growth spurt and chucked down one good time."

A gold medal in the 50m freestyle in the 17+ age group was a breakthrough success in 2019, and one that later helped earn a place in Loughborough University's swimming programme.

"It just clicked with swimming and I had to decide to drop rugby," Cohoon said.

"Then I knew at Cirencester I wasn't going to take it to the next level so I had to move to Loughborough.

"It has been quite a crazy journey because when I came here I didn't have many hours under my belt."

'Absolutely monumental'

Alex Cohoon moved to the Loughborough University swimming programme from the Cirencester Swimming Club

Cohoon moved from the club where he first started swimming aged five to join a programme that shared the pool with multiple Olympic and World champion Adam Peaty.

Andi Manley, director of swimming at the university, says attitude and potential are traits that are sought and which Cohoon had in abundance.

"Just looking at rankings or the times they are swimming tells you nothing about the person," Manley said.

"And Alex is a great example of that. When he came to us a few years ago he was relatively unknown - he wasn’t a superstar coming in.

"But the structure and the programme we have here allowed him to come in and be coached well, gave him extra access to training and a strength and conditioning coach and gave him the tools to get up that ladder.

"It is a brilliant story. What Alex has done is absolutely monumental and we are so proud of his journey."

Within months of starting at Loughborough University, Cohoon was fast-tracked to the high performance team.

Olympic qualification was the aim, with Los Angeles the realistic target in 2028.

Paris was always the "really long shot", Cohoon admits.

A fourth-placed finish in the 100m freestyle at the British Swimming Championships in April - with a personal best time of 48.2 seconds - earned him a place on the relay team alongside the experienced trio of Matt Richards, Duncan Scott and Tom Dean.

Ian Hume, swimming head coach at Loughborough, is accustomed to overseeing success in the pool with a stable of Olympians working under him.

Twelve of the Team GB squad of 33 swimmers heading to the French capital train at Loughborough University.

But Hume says seeing Cohoon grab a place in Paris was special.

"That moment when Alex made the Olympics, and because he was an outsider - and not to belittle him, it was such a small chance - when he touched the wall and I saw fourth next to his name, I'll remember that for the rest of my life," Hume said.