Scotland’s Robbie Renwick Relishing His New Surroundings

Headed into this year’s FINA World Championships, the United States owned a winning streak in the men’s 800m freestyle relay dating back to 2005 and came to Kazan stacked with talent to continue the tradition.  

However, as the world soon discovered, an unexpected force in the form of Great Britain rose to the top of the podium, as the nation blasted a winning time of 7:04.33 to win the country’s first ever title in the relay event at a world championships.

The combination of Robbie Renwick, Dan Wallace, Callum Jarvis and James Guy proved to be the winning recipe to make the magic happen and beat out the Americans and Australians.  Remarkably, though, there was a time when this potent squad was at risk of never coming to be.

27-year old Scottish swimmer, Robbie Renwick, who swam as the second leg on the winning relay with a career-best split of 1:45.98, reveals that he seriously contemplated quitting the sport of swimming after settling into a plateau of sorts in recent years.  

Renwick first established himself as a rising star when, at just 17, he anchored the Scottish men’s 800m freestyle relay to a silver medal at the 2006 Commonwealth Games.  Renwick then achieved personal recognition at the 2010 edition of the Commonwealth Game, where he claimed gold in the 200m freestyle event.

However, after finishing 5th and 7th in the 200m and 400m freestyle events, respectively, at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, Renwick says he was “ready to quit” the sport.  Reflecting on his then-state of mind, Renwick told BBC Scotland this week, “I was down with my performances as I’d thrown everything into that year and I couldn’t understand why I didn’t deliver a gold medal.”

For the previous six years leading up to the 2014 Commonwealth Games, Renwick had been training with the City of Glasgow swimming team, but found himself in a plateau situation.  Remembering the routine at that point in his career, the Scot said, “I was getting up at five o’clock after maybe five or six hours’ sleep and then training again at 5pm and that was not a good lifestyle at all for a performance athlete.”

Renwick continued, that he knew the way he was training in Glasgow led to his internal realization that “there was no point in me carrying on because I wasn’t improving, I wasn’t happy with my swimming so I had to move to Stirling or quit swimming; that was it.”

Acting on his desire to break through and re-establish himself on the international swimming stage, Renwick made the move to Stirling University, the home of Scottish standouts Ross Murdoch and Duncan Scott.  

Said Renwick of his first impressions of Stirling, ‘I knew they were doing great things at the University of Stirling before because Ross Murdoch came through and won the gold medal at the Commonwealth Games, so I knew there was something special going on here.”

Now, after having trained several months under coaches Ben Higson and Steven Tigg, Renwick can more truly appreciate the environment in which he now finds himself.  “It’s really performance driven here, and it’s geared up towards the athlete, whereas the year before I was kind of always working against that. The set-up is fantastic; the coaches and the sports scientist and support is the best in the world”, according to Renwick in his BBC Scotland interview. 

“It’s going away from the mentality of having to swim as hard as you can all the time. It’s actually about being smart when you train, and really focusing on each competition and your long-term goal rather than a short-term goal”, he continued to explain to BBC Scotland.

In light of his relatively new surroundings and mental outlook, Renwick now expresses that his love of the sport is back and any retirement plans are a distant memory.  “The athletes are happy, they’re all swimming really fast and carrying that on to next year.”

Renwick is eyeing the British Olympic trials set to take place in Glasgow next April, where he will be putting everything on the line to qualify for his third Olympic Games.