Swimmer Cassie Patten has won an Olympic Games bronze medal and she is a two-times silver medallist at the world championships.

The now 38-year-old has an impressive CV and yet one of her greatest achievements came away from the water, albeit it was swimming related.

“It was while I was working at the London Olympics,” said Cassie, who was forced to retire from swimming because of injury in 2011.

“I worked as a commentator for Sky TV and I was also doing some work for the IOC.”

And it was the International Olympic Committee who presented her with one of the greatest challenges of her life.

“It was before the open-water event in Hyde Park,” she explained. “The organisers wanted me to climb to the top of the comms tower and read out the Olympic Oath in front of 150,000 people. I was really out of breath because I ran to the tower, they hardly gave me any notice.”

And what made it that much tougher is that Cassie is “really dyslexic”, so reading was something that was anything but straightforward.

She got through it, of course, but she said: “I was more nervous than I ever was for a race. Even now, whenever life gets tough, I think of that moment and how I managed to cope with it.”

Born and bred in Cornwall, Cassie readily admits that swimming helped her manage some difficult times in her early school years, years which she often found a struggle.

Fortunately, she liked to swim and it was soon apparent that she was rather good at it.

She swam in her first national age group championships at the age of 13, and a year later she went to Plymouth College as a swimming scholar.

In those early days she swam 200 metres butterfly, but once she moved to Stockport Metro Swimming Club at the age of 19 her coach Sean Kelly trained her to become a freestyle distance swimmer.

She was by now a full-time swimmer and although that sounds fun, there were a lot of sacrifices that had to be made along the way, especially when you are training to swim 800 metres in the pool or 10 kilometres in open water.

“There were 10 pool sessions every week when we would just swim,” she said. “They were usually two hours but were sometimes longer.

“We’d also do weight training, running, physiotherapy and have massages.”

The massages weren’t necessarily pleasant experiences either and Cassie added: “It was very tough.”

Luckily Cassie liked hard work and she continued: “I was blessed with a very strong work ethic, I always wanted to be an Olympian.”

And it was becoming apparent that her dream could become a reality because in 2006, her breakout year, she won the European Cup in open water, the first year she had competed in the discipline.

In 2007, she won silver at the world championships in Melbourne, also in open water, a feat she matched in 2008, although 2008 will always be remembered by her supporters as the year she won her bronze at the Beijing Olympics.

She also reached the final of the 800 metres in Beijing, becoming the first swimmer to reach a final in the pool and win a medal in open water.

The current Olympic open water champion Sharon van Rouwendaal is an open water specialist, as are many today, but Cassie has no regrets about competing in more than one discipline.

“The training wasn’t really that different,” she said. “I did more speed work for the 800 and that helped the 10K and I did lots of distance swimming to get 10K fit.

“My results were better in open water but I couldn’t say which I preferred.

“In the pool it’s pretty standard, you’re in your lane and you know how it works, there’s a bit more uncertainty in open water.

“A rival swimmer can accidentally knock your goggles which then fill up with water, the tides can change and so can the weather, sometimes you can start in calm weather and finish in a gale.”

Happily it was calm in Beijing when Cassie won her medal – she completed in one hour, 59 minutes, 31 seconds – but despite all her success she never really considered herself to be a top swimmer.

“Not like Michael Phelps,” she said. “It was great to be an Olympic medal winner but I never thought I was very good.

“As an athlete I was always trying to get better, I felt I could always improve, it wasn’t great for my mental health.”

There were some very tough times, of course, not least when she was forced to retire from the sport because of an injury to her right shoulder a year before the London Olympics.

That was absolutely devastating – “I’d been focusing on competing in my home Olympics for three years,” she said – and she admits that had she not been offered the opportunity to work at the London Games she wouldn’t have watched any of the action.

“Working in London was a really nice closure,” she said. “The injury was out of my control but to work in an official capacity was special, I wouldn’t have gone to the Games otherwise.”

And post-competitive swimming, Cassie has been equally successful.

The mum-of-two, who is married to Martin Raikes, trained to be a PE teacher, has worked as a director of swimming at a school and has run swimming coaching companies under her own name.

In 2022 she set up WaveCrest, a company dedicated to helping swimmers of all ages and abilities fulfil their potential.

“It’s very varied,” she said. “I’ve helped people from the age of three all the way to 78.”

She offers one-to-one coaching and much, much more and, as you’d expect, pours her heart and soul into it.

Swimming is a massive part of her life, of course, but it still has to take second billing to her family.

She and her husband lived in Fairford for five years before moving a few miles east to Carterton where they now live with their two young children Lily and Edmund.

Lily, who is seven, was born on 20^th August, the same date that Cassie won her bronze in Beijing.

Her middle name is Olympia and the Southrop Primary School pupil is already showing an interest in swimming, as is her younger brother.

Cassie is well-known at the school and was one of the driving forces alongside the PTA behind the successful Save our Minibus appeal earlier this year.

“It’s a wonderful school, everyone pulled together for the minibus appeal,” she said. “Schools in the Cotswolds can be quite isolated so having a school bus opens up so many opportunities for children.”

And Cassie Patten certainly knows how important it is to make the most of every opportunity that comes your way.