Our Alumni are still smashing it!
Some of our alumni just couldn’t get enough of it at CUSWPC and are still making massive waves in the pool! Read on to find out how Steve Braine, Roger Sharpley, Peter Leach, Nigel Burnham and Alex Norcliffe are getting on.
Steve Braine performed outstandingly at the World Masters Championships over the summer, winning a bronze in the 50m Butterfly and achieving top 10 places in the 50m and 100m Freestyle and the 50m Backstroke. All while recovering from an illness: unbelievable! More recently he’s been racing at the National Masters Championships alongside Roger Sharpley, managing to break a European record in the medley relay and bagging 5 gold and 2 silver medals!
Additionally, all the way over in Canada, Peter Leach has completely smashed the Canadian masters age group record for the 4x100m freestyle relay, knocking a full 25 seconds off the previous time for the 80+ category!
Here’s a short report from Peter on his rather remarkable masters journey.
“In 2010, my Technosport team (a large Ottawa based club with 300 active swimmers), entered the Canadian Masters Swimming Championships in Nanaimo, BC. I was invited to join several relays including the Long-course 4 x 100 Mixed Relay in the 240-279 age classification. That year was the first year in which FINA was recognizing this relay for records. Rather than asking counties for the fastest national records and using the fastest of those to set the record baseline, they just took the first recorded swim. Ours was the second event in which this relay was swum, and we beat the first recorded time. As a result, we swam a World record, and I have a World record certificate to prove it. What was more incredible was that, in the previous heat the slightly older team from the same club (280 -319 years combined) also swam a world record – two world records back-to-back for the same club. Unfortunately, our record only lasted 13 days. It was eclipsed by an Australian team by a significant margin.
This spring, I swam in the Ontario Provincial Championships, again in the Technosport team, with 3 members from the World records above. This time we were swimming in the 320-359 age classification in the 4 x100 Men’s Freestyle relay. We again obliterated the previous Canadian record by a mere 26 seconds. Every member of this team was over 80!!! I was the lead swimmer and made my 100 in 1:32:92!
Among the “oldies” of our club, we have a second level mantra: “If you can’t beat them, outlast them”.
It is interesting that these stories all involve records, so clearly the competitive instinct is still present, 60 years after competing for Cambridge.”
Slightly closer to home, Nigel Burnham has taken on the Chillswim Ullswater end to end swim, which is a 7.5 mile swim in the Lake District. After swimming the length of Windermere (11 Miles) and the Coniston Water Swim (5.25 Miles) in 2023, it’s safe to say that he just keeps going.
A more recent graduate is Alex Norcliffe who’s just managed to escape CUSWPC after 9 years at Cambridge! According to Alex his “fondest memory [was] winning varsity in 2023. [Cambridge] had had a fantastic year, but so had Oxford. The game was incredibly close always with Oxford having a 3rd quarter comeback, but [Cambridge] pulled away winning 23-16, revenge for the previous year! A close second [was] winning varsity 2025, this was [his] farewell game, and [he] felt a lot of love from both Cambridge and even Oxford.”
If anyone else is still getting up to anything in the water please let us know (cuswpc.alumni@gmail.com). Whether it’s high level competition or just enjoying the odd dip with friends, we’d love to hear about how a passion developed at Cambridge has stayed with you throughout the years.
Steve Braine (right) and Roger Sharpley (left) at the National Masters Championships
The winning men’s water polo varsity team 2025 (Alex Norcliffe top left)