\u201cWhen you lose a parent, you wish you could have one more conversation with them. This has allowed me to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Adam Wilkie is embarking on a remarkable challenge to honour his dad, former British Olympic champion David Wilkie MBE, while raising money for the next generation of British athletes.<\/p>\n
David won gold in the 200m breaststroke at the 1976 Montreal Olympics in a world record of 2:15.11, and now 50 years on, Adam is giving himself a year to try and match that time while raise a fitting \u00a3215,000 for SportsAid.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was trying to work out how I honour my dad, especially given how much he had achieved,\u201d explained Adam.<\/p>\n
\u201cI spoke to different charities and was like, should we create a fund in his name? I spoke to Aquatics GB about an award in his name. Those are lovely and they’re brilliant, but they felt like full stops on his legacy.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, I was trying to think, what can I do as his son to do something that is quite scary, daunting, that I put myself out there to honour him and to make this living and breathing so his legacy itself can live on and have a positive impact.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m turning that negativity of losing him into something very positive and by doing something so hard, I realised I could use that to help the next generation and raise some money.\u201d<\/p>\n
David won three Olympic medals for Team GB \u2013 he added 100m breaststroke silver to the gold in Montreal, having also won silver in the 200m breaststroke four years earlier at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.<\/p>\n
Those accolades stand alongside three World Championship titles, two European Championship titles and two Commonwealth Games golds as well as additional podium finishes at all those championships.<\/p>\n
Perhaps most impressively the Scotsman collected them all before he turned 23, retiring from competitive swimming a month after the 1976 Olympics aged 22.<\/p>\n
After he died from cancer in 2024 aged 70, Adam realised he knew very little about his father\u2019s swimming career having been born 17 years after it finished and is now taking on the challenge to reconnect with his father while processing his grief.<\/p>\n
\u201cI lost my dad two years ago and since that moment you wish you could learn from them, you wish that you could ask them questions about their life and what they did and all of that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m very lucky in the sense that I’ve got this legacy to go back through, to still learn from and to stay connected to my father.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy dad was a very humble man. So, he didn’t really talk about his accolades that much at home. He was dad to me.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, there was a lot about his swimming career that I didn’t know. So, through this process, I\u2019m able to figure this all out, find out all this information and see how damn good he was.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was chatting to a swimming journalist the other day, and he put it in context that dad broke the world record by three seconds in a 200m swimming event. In the modern era, you don’t do that. It\u2019s nigh-on-impossible.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy dad had an autobiography that was written in the late 70s, early 80s. Obviously, I never read it when he was alive. I really didn’t even know it existed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt would have felt very strange to be reading a book on your dad when he’s downstairs in the kitchen, and you’re upstairs in your bedroom, so I never did.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut then when he died, I read it and I learned so much. It\u2019s been wonderful to have these things to be able to learn about my dad and to hear people’s stories and their memories of meeting him. It very much keeps his memory alive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Adam\u2019s swimming experience is limited to school-level with his dad never forcing him to take it as seriously as he once did.<\/p>\n
While he got back in the pool after his dad died, the 33-year-old senior global brand manager has set himself a lofty target to match his dad\u2019s former world record.<\/p>\n
After launching the challenge formally at the British Swimming Championships on 18 April, Adam quit his marketing job shortly after to focus on improving his time after setting a first baseline of 2:57, a whole 42 seconds off the target time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would have liked to have been lower, but I was quite happy because that was literally my first time racing in a 50m pool and my first time trying to do a 200m breaststroke,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think my dad would think I was mad. He was the man that set that time and so he knows how much work it took and how hard it is and how hard swimming is.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, I think he would think, \u2018Okay, yeah, go for it.\u2019 He would support me, for sure. But I think he’d be like, \u2018Just to let you know, it’s going to hurt. It’s going to take some doing.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I think he’d also be proud. He\u2019d be happy that I was doing something to deal with my grief, to keep his memory present and to honour him and his legacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sportsbeat 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWhen you lose a parent, you wish you could have one more conversation with them. This has allowed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":503719,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,105],"class_list":["post-503718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/503719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}