‘Retiring never crossed my mind’ – Firth on motherhood & swimming return

“I love being a mum.”

That much is evident as Bethany Firth gives her daughter Charlotte a massive hug.

“Being a mum, it is the best thing I’ve ever done, but the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” explained the six-time Paralympic swimming champion.

“She gives me so much more perspective, and I think she makes me want to be a better person. She makes me want to work harder and try harder and just keep going.”

Charlotte was born at the start of August 2024 to Bethany and husband Andrew.

Now, just over a year later, she is getting ready for her first long-haul flight, as Charlotte will travel to Singapore with dad and her grandmother Lindsey to cheer on mum as Bethany returns to action at the World Para Swimming Championships.

It will be the first time in more than two years that Firth has competed for Great Britain, the last occasion being the World Championships in Manchester in August 2023.

Firth won two of her five world titles there and was preparing for the Paris Paralympics when she got news of her pregnancy.

Now as she prepares to return to international competition for the first time as a mother, Firth wants to be a role model for other female athletes who choose to start a family.

“Sport definitely is a very selfish thing, and I feel like it’s really hard for women these days,” she said.

“A lot of people expect you to choose, ‘do you want a family, do you want sport?’

“I felt like whenever I announced that I was having Charlotte, everyone just assumed, ‘oh, she’s retired. That’s it’.

“I felt that really hard. I was like, ‘why are people making this decision for me?’

“I want her to be around the sport. I felt like I also don’t want to give up. I wanted to show her, actually, we can do both.

“We’re not going to give up. For me and my swimming, I’ve obviously not raced at Worlds yet, but I feel like it’s definitely given me more purpose and more joy towards this sport.

There is no doubt that when you talk with Firth now, she has a different perspective on life and her swimming.

“People always put a lot of pressure on me. I felt like people expected me to win gold, and it turned into more of a pressure and something that I had to prove myself,” she said.

“I felt like I wasn’t good enough if I didn’t get the gold, but having Charlotte just changed everything.

“Watching the girls compete in Paris, I thought it was great. It made me want to swim, but it didn’t make me feel like I missed it, or I would change anything or I wanted to be there, to be truly honest.

“When I win a medal, you get that buzz for a few seconds. With Charlotte I get that buzz all the time, when she crawls or when she walks or when she does the little things she does.”

So, did she ever contemplate retirement? After all Firth is one of Northern Ireland’s most successful athletes.

Six Paralympic titles plus three silvers, five world titles, four silvers and a bronze and a gold for Northern Ireland at the 2022 Commonwealth Games. No one would have had anything negative to say if she had decided to stop.

“I think it was more that people assumed I would finish my career and the more they assumed, the more it annoyed me, and the more I thought, actually, this is really bad for women in sport,” she added.

“Why do we have to choose? Why are people just assuming I’d stop if I had a child?

It’s hasn’t been easy getting back to being a world-class swimmer again.

The morning we meet at the pool in Bangor, she is coming to the end of a two-hour training session after being there since 6am.

Charlotte is suffering from a cold and kept her mum up most of the night while dad is working the night shift.

Nana Firth has come around to the house at 5am to take over babysitting duties so her daughter can head to the pool.

Firth is tired but her face lights up when Charlotte arrives to see her mum.

“It’s extremely tough,” she said. “Your body goes through something incredible to have a baby and it is really tough coming back, and it’s really tough seeing the times that you used to swim and know that you need to get back there if you want to be at the top. It’s a really long road and really hard road.

“Coming back, I just kept thinking, ‘I want to qualify for Worlds. I want to prove that I can at least qualify and get there.’

“And getting up in the morning when I haven’t slept, but seeing her little face makes me be like, ‘oh, I can do it’.

“But I won’t lie, it is very tough, and I feel like you do need a really good support system around you, because if you don’t have that, I don’t know how you would cope.

“To be honest, if you had asked me throughout my career what’s your proudest moment, I’d actually probably have been like, ‘oh, I don’t know.’

Firth will swim three individual events and maybe two relays in Singapore. She will stay in the team hotel but the family will not be too far away.

Her times in training and at the few competitions she has taken part in this year are encouraging.

What a moment it would be if she was to get on the podium again, this time as a mum with her daughter in the crowd.

Is Charlotte a water baby?

“You love the water, you love splashing, don’t you? I feel like she shows me how to kick, don’t you?” Firth says to Charlotte and gets a big grin in return.

She is noncommittal about the future. There are the Commonwealth Games next year and then the bigger question of the 2028 LA Paralympics.

“I think what I’ve learned is that I’m actually not in control of what’s coming in the future,” she said.

“You know, I could tell you X, Y and Z and it’s actually not going to happen.

“So I just believe that God has a plan for me and what comes next year will come next year.

“But I’m just really focused on getting over the 13-hour flight to Singapore and getting there and just having a really good time.

“I can’t wait for Charlotte to be like, ‘Go mummy’.

“I’m the only person she can shout, ‘Go mummy’ for in that pool.