Rebecca Adlington revealed she’s been “overwhelmed by support” in the year since sharing the news of her miscarriage at 20 weeks.
After losing her daughter Harper in October 2023, the swimming star says self care has been “absolutely fundamental” to healing from the devastating loss – after also previously losing a baby at 12 weeks.
A double-Olympic champion in Beijing 2008 and a double-bronze medalist at London 2012 in the 800m and 400m, Adlington now works as a BBC pundit and commentator. She says: “It took properly six months where I just didn’t feel like myself at all, almost like this dark cloud was just constantly there – I feel like that has lifted.”
Her family – including husband Andy Parsons, daughter from her first marriage, Summer, and son with Parsons, Albie – have a cherry tree dedicated to the child they lost, who they named Harper, and plan to put a plaque there to mark the year since.
“Sometimes it did, it does, consume you. There were times where, within any process of grief, where I’d randomly just start crying,” shares the 35-year-old.
“I think the ‘first’ of everything is quite difficult – getting past our due date was quite difficult.”
And for former pro Adlington, as well as spending a lot of time with friends and family, swimming has been a key part of her recovery “On a Sunday morning I go for a 40 minute swim. I don’t go fast at all, my phone is in my locker, literally nobody can contact me. It’s just me in the pool and there’s no distraction.
“I’ve just got to let my mind go from one thing to the other and be at total peace”.
The couple announced their pregnancy on social media when they felt they were “out of the real danger zone”, she says. “I had a miscarriage at 12 weeks before, that’s why I waited until I was 15 weeks pregnant. I’d had three scans and a midwife appointment where I heard the heartbeat.
“I felt naively that I was kind of in a safe spot because everything was absolutely fine.”
They didn’t know anything was wrong until a routine scan at 20 weeks – or five months pregnant – when no heartbeat was detected. She was given a pill to take and two days later, went into labour.
“I very naively didn’t realise I had to give birth. I felt that was more cruel in a way,” she says. It’s something she wants other people to understand better about late miscarriages. “I think that whole medical side is quite hard to digest, and I think it isn’t publicly known or out there.”
Adlington, who is working with Interflora on a campaign to encourage people to open up and tackle tricky conversations, with their new Conversation In Bloom Cards, says: “We’ve certainly found that, going through something like we have with miscarriage, it’s a hard topic to talk about, it’s a hard topic to listen to. I can see that it might cause discomfort or awkwardness for other people, because people don’t know what to say.
Just as she had publicly shared her pregnancy to her 175,000 Instagram followers, Adlington decided to post about losing the pregnancy too.
“I wanted to come out and say something because I didn’t just want to go from her with a baby bump announcing her pregnancy, to, ‘Oh, where’s that bump gone?’ It had to be addressed because of that process, and at first it was a really scary thing. I didn’t know how to put it out there. I didn’t know what to say.
“I was just so overwhelmed by the support and by so many, honestly, thousands upon thousands of messages and so many people.”
But it also highlighted for her how often people don’t talk about baby loss. “I was genuinely surprised about how many people said, ‘Oh, I haven’t even told my friends and family’,” she says.
“I’ve had people messaging me that 15 years on, they’re really struggling mentally. They don’t know how to process it, it’s not something that just disappears.
“I don’t think people do it to try and be secretive. It’s just people do try and process it alone, because it’s a hard thing to navigate, and I think you’re trying to process it yourself. And actually, I genuinely don’t think you can after a while, because it just eats away at you.”
Adlington had support from the miscarriage charity Petals, but says: “It isn’t something where you have two weeks off work and then you’re fine – you’re not fine.” Workplaces don’t usually have anything in place specifically for leave after a miscarriage – baby loss up to 24 weeks, and stillbirth – after 24 weeks.
“It was hard at first to go back to work, because it was so public, everyone feels sorry for you. I think I found a couple of people just being a little bit awkward because they didn’t know what to say. And it was just a really hard thing. And I tried to address the elephant in the room, going, ‘I appreciate everyone’s concern, let’s just crack on with work,” says Adlington, who works as a director of swim!, providing centres and programmes for children’s swimming lessons.
Two months after the loss, she presented BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year. “It was the first public thing that I did – I pretty much cancelled everything else and just hibernated for a little bit. But I love Sports Personality, and I was like, you know what, I’ve got to face the big bad world sometime.
“It was very hard putting a dress on and putting make-up on and that sort of stuff when you feel really crappy about yourself. But it was the first step of trying to get a bit of my life [back].
“I won’t ever be the same as I was before. It’s not a case of forgetting that it ever happened, it’s trying to find a way to move forward and still live your life – but in a new capacity and in a new way.”
Being a mum-of-two has helped enormously in her recovery, she says. “That was actually the best thing, I was exceptionally grateful to have two beautiful, healthy children at home. I felt exceptionally lucky. One of my friends went through five miscarriages and never had children.
“I felt so like I just wanted to hold my kids even tighter. I wanted to give them a cuddle even more, I felt more connected to them. I’m just so grateful that my children are OK.”
Interflora has launched Conversation In Bloom cards to help navigate tricky conversations and form deeper connections, available from Interflora.co.uk, with an RRP of £10.
