In the October of 2017 British Swimming welcomed new CEO Jack Buckner to the organisation and he certainly hit the ground running. Within weeks of starting his new role Jack had travelled to China, Denmark and across the UK to meet athletes from across our sports, coaches, stakeholders and attended events.
“2017 was an exciting year for me. Most of the year I was working at British Triathlon and we did some big new events, brought in some new sponsorship and hopefully when I left the sport was in a pretty good place.
“Now I’ve started at British Swimming and it has been a massive learning curve for me. A brand new sport, a much bigger sport. But there are some really great people working there and I count myself lucky every day for being able to work in sport.
“This year has certainly presented its challenges for sporting National Governing Bodies and sport in general but we all innovating and developing and I think we are in a good place to push aquatic sport onto the next level.
“Next year I really want to crack on with the job as such. Glasgow 2018 European Championships will be huge, because it is the first time there has been such a big multi-sport games attempted in this type of concept.
“Getting that right, I think there will be quite a lot of nerves behind the scenes, but getting that right for British Swimming is key.
“We are also introducing new elements to our domestic events including live streaming the British Diving Championships from Plymouth for the first time. This is part of a wider plan to enhance both the athlete and spectator experience at our events.
“The 2018 competition calendar is a jam-packed one with Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast in April, the previously mentioned home European Championships up in Glasgow in the summer as well as the Para-Swimming European Championships in Dublin.
“This ensures that our athletes will be served up a great range of exciting yet challenging opportunities as we continue to work our way through the Tokyo 2020 quadrennial.
“I’d also like to secure some more domestically held international events. It’s a great sport but I think we need more events and some exciting new things that support our athletes. So I’m really looking forward to seeing where the next 12 months will take us and what we can achieve as an organisation.”