Leah Schlosshan eyeing senior step up after European Junior Championships glory

The 17-year-old City of Leeds swimmer won gold in the 200m individual medley at the European Junior Championships in Bucharest to add to the relay bronze she won at the championships 12 months earlier.

Her newly-earned status as a major international champion now sets her up nicely to step up to the senior ranks in 2023.

There is a European short course championships in the same pool she has just swum in next year, as well as the world championships in Japan next summer to aim for.

“Next year it’ll be the senior Europeans and senior worlds for me,” Schlosshan told the YEP.

“It’s just another step up, I’m now aiming for more golds.

“You put in so much work in training and then to get the results is exactly what you want.

“It was a very good night in Bucharest.”

The gold medal in Romania made all the hard work and sacrifice worth it.

Schlosshan and her team-mates at the John Charles Aquatics Centre train 21 hours a week, in her case around her school work at Bradford Grammar School.

That workload will not change over the next 12 months as she goes into her final year before deciding on which university to go to.

She will do so with a gold medal around her neck after touching the line in a time of 2.13:49 in Bucharest.

“It was quite shocking, to see it on the board but also the time. I really wanted to go under 2.14 seconds so to do a mid 2.13 I was really happy with the time,” says Schlosshan.

“That’s the time I’d been swimming in training and aiming for in competition, so it was really nice to see.

“It feels really great to be European champion, it’s still not sunk in fully but it feels really nice.”

The achievement came just a few days after she was eliminated in the heats of the 400m individual medley.

“I don’t know what happened, maybe it was a mixture of nerves.

“(Head coach) Richard Denigan spoke to me about it, told me to put it behind me, that 200 is a completely different race. I had to be confident with my training as well, just think about that.

“I had to get over it quickly and learn from it.”

She certainly did that, winning each of the heats, the semi-final and of course the final of the 200m.

“I was quite nervous the morning of the race, but the night before it was all excitement,” she recalls.

“Leading up to the race I wasn’t as nervous as I thought I would be, my only thought was I need to swim this race and win it.

“The other Great Britain swimmer, Phoebe Cooper, went out very quickly, she’s a very good fly swimmer and has a good backstroke.

“I know my breastroke is my strongest in the IM, so I knew I couldn’t get too far behind on the backstroke otherwise I’d be catching up loads.”