30/07/2026
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🏊♀️💙 40 YEARS LATER, THE POOL GIVES BACK WHAT POLITICS TOOK AWAY 💙🏊♀️
In 1986, 19 year old Annette Cowley stood in the athletes' village in Edinburgh, ready to swim the race of her life at the Commonwealth Games. Her trial time was faster than the eventual gold medal winner. She was the favourite.
Then politics intervened. Cowley, born in South Africa, had qualified to swim for England. But as the Commonwealth boycott over apartheid grew to 32 nations, the Games Federation ruled she couldn't compete.
She was escorted from the village by police and watched the race from the stands instead. Years later, she was overlooked for South Africa's own 1992 Olympic team too, caught between two flags with a place in neither.
Now, four decades on, Annette gets to watch differently. Her twin daughters, Georgia and Olivia Nel, have both been selected for Team South Africa at the 2026 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the very Games their mother was denied. Georgia, training at Tuks in Pretoria alongside Olympic medallist Pieter Coetzé, will swim the 200m freestyle, her mother's own event, plus two relays.
Their mom never pushed them toward the pool. They found it on their own, and only later learned whose daughters they really were.
Forty years is a long time to wait for a moment like this. 🇿🇦
