Cathy White was Teesdale’s very own teenage pool princess who swam for Great Britain in the 1984 Olympics. In an exclusive interview with Philip Tallentire, she looks back to that remarkable summer and her incredible sporting career
It was the height of a golden Californian summer.
The globe’s elite athletes had descended on Los Angeles for the 1984 Olympic Games, and Teesdale was represented by none other than homegrown swimming queen Cathy White.
Aged 19 and at the peak of her powers, the former Teesdale School pupil, who’s now Cathy Downey, was carrying on her shoulders the hopes of the town and the Dale, as well as her family nervously watched her exploits on TV back home in Startforth.
Looking back 41 years later, Cathy admits the memory of that momentous year brings tears to her eyes.
It was the culmination of ten years of hard work and dedication and it would provide both her most cherished sporting memories and greatest frustration.
Thanks to kind scheduling, Cathy was able to attend the opening ceremony with her Great Britain team-mates in the huge Los Angeles Coliseum which, in true Hollywood fashion, featured an appearance by President Ronald Reagan and an astronaut flying a jet pack!
“I still cry now – it was absolutely mind-blowing,” Cathy says, looking back on that hot July afternoon and evening.
“When the Olympic flame was lit it was just one of the most emotional moments of my life, I was thinking, ‘Every dream that I have had has come true, it’s what I’ve wanted for 10 years and I’m actually here in person’.
“I was 19 in LA, I’d trained for ten years for that very moment. To walk out in front of 90,000 people and you’ve got President Reagan in the stadium, and I was this little kid from Barney walking out…”
In Los Angeles, Cathy competed in the 100m and 200m backstroke and the 4x100m medley.
And while she swam her fastest ever times in the competition, she agonisingly missed out on a place in the 200m final.
“I swam a lifetime best in the 200m backstroke in the morning but that finished me ninth overall and it was the top eight that made the final,” she remembers.
“The girl that came eighth to my ninth said she thought I was going to catch her, and I thought, ‘I wish I had’.
“And then, in the B final, I did another lifetime best. I beat my personal best twice in one day. I did my best ever performance for 200m backstroke in LA.
“I’ve had to live with that ninth-place finish, it’s not something I’m happy about.
“I’d rather say, ‘Olympic finalist’, thank you very much’, but I’ve had to deal with coming ninth for the rest of my life and it frustrates me and annoys me but that makes me the competitor I am.
“My mum and dad said, ‘You did a lifetime best in the morning and another lifetime best’ but I replied, ‘Yeah, but I was ninth’!”
Cathy now lives in Maghull, near Liverpool, with her husband Dave, but retains a huge fondness for Barnard Castle and visits as often as she can.
She remembers with pride and gratitude the support she received in the build-up to the 1984 Olympics from the Teesdale Mercury’s Cathy White Fund, which was launched by the paper to help finance her trip to the USA.
In the 1980s, British athletes had to overcome huge hurdles to be able to compete on the international stage.
There was virtually no external funding available and most were, in every sense of the word, amateurs.
Cathy, who hadn’t qualified for the Olympics at the time the fund was announced in February 1984, admitted she felt additional pressure to perform well due to the expectations of the Teesdale public.
“The fund itself was amazing, the support from the whole of Teesdale was amazing,” she says.
“Money dripped in from everywhere and it was quite overwhelming to be honest, and it did make a difference, down to the food I was able to eat.
“I will be eternally grateful for that, as my parents were.
But it did add a different kind of pressure because I was so scared of letting people down. I said to mum and dad, ‘What if I don’t make the squad, how will I ever walk through Market Place again’?”
Fortunately, as we have seen, she did make the squad and did herself, her family and Teesdale proud in LA.
Cathy was born in Portsmouth but moved north at a very young age with her parents Daphne and Ralph, who both hailed from the south coast.
“My dad was in the navy for 25 years before joining Barnard Castle School as a sportsmaster, hence the move,” she explains.
Ironically, given that both her parents were swimming instructors, Cathy wasn’t taught by them, unlike so many other young people who grew up in Teesdale in the 1970s and 80s.
“My parents didn’t teach me how to swim, I think that says it all,” she reveals. “They never made me do anything I didn’t want to do.
“But I never wanted to do anything else. Children are asked, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’
“My answer was, ‘I want to swim in the Olympics’. You’d get a patronising pat on the head, but I said, ‘No, no that’s what I want to do’. And I don’t think I ever questioned it.
“We had an agreement in the house that competing at a high standard is not just difficult physically, it also is tough mentally.
Mum and dad said, ‘The day you don’t want to do this anymore, you have to tell us, don’t do it because you feel obliged to do it, or for anybody else, if your heart is not in it, be true to yourself’.”
Unlike today, the UK had very few 50m pools, meaning many talented and highly-motivated swimmers like Cathy had to train in shorter pools, often far from home.
A member of the South Tyneside club, Cathy had to make the journey to South Shields to train with her coach Paddy Hayes in the town’s 25m pool. She also regularly trained in the much smaller pool at Barnard Castle School.
But her talent and dedication saw her become a 100m and 200m backstroke national champion in 1982 and she also recorded a new 100m world record in her age group at the World Student Games in Lille the same year.
Cathy was rewarded with senior international call-ups, starting with the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane, where she won a 4x100m medley silver medal and reached the finals of the 100m and 200m backstroke representing England.
“It was mindblowing,” she answers, when asked what it was like to compete in Australia in September 1982. “Daunting, exhilarating – it’s everything you dream of but, wow, it’s a big stage.
“And I was homesick, I didn’t have my family or Paddy, my coach. But it was amazing at the time.
“At 17, I came back to Barney with a Commonwealth Games silver and was straight back into school, that was bizarre!”
After the 1984 Olympics, Cathy’s focus eventually turned to the 1986 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh.
She moved to City of Leeds Swimming Club but was hampered by a shoulder injury and failed to settle. However, she rejoined South Tyneside and was reunited with long-time coach Paddy Hayes.
At the Commonwealth Games in Scotland she reached the 200m final and was swimming close to her best times again. An additional bonus was she was able to get tickets for her parents to watch her compete in Edinburgh after missing the Brisbane and LA games due to the prohibitive travelling costs.
“That was lovely, getting tickets for mum and dad,” Cathy recalls.
The following year she decided to call it a day.
“Physically I was tired,” she admits. “My shoulders were giving me pain and therefore, when you’re not 100 per cent physically, you doubt yourself mentally.
“Once you doubt yourself mentally, you’re on a downward spiral. And the 1988 Olympics were a lifetime away, it felt like an eternity.
“You live and breathe swimming, there isn’t much room for anything else.
“I was 22 when, one morning, I came downstairs and sat down and said, ‘You know what?’ and mum and dad knew what I was going to say, they knew what was coming. I fell out of love with it.”
The demanding lifestyle of a competitive swimmer had taken its toll on Cathy, who had made many sacrifices over the years. It’s fair to say it wasn’t a glamorous life.
“I constantly had no money, I stank of chlorine, I was living in sports kit and living out of kit bags week-in, week-out,” she says.
“Travelling here, travelling there, training away during the week, coming home weekends, just the whole lifestyle, it was hard.
“I didn’t have a car. Anyone on the GB team now, they’ll all have cars, they’ll all be funded.
“It was hard, really hard, walking to the pool in South Shields at 5am in the middle of winter. It’s hard but would I do it again? Yes, 100 per cent.
“I missed most of my friends’ 18th birthday parties,” she adds. “The issue was I competed most weekends, so when my school friends were going out, I was in a pool somewhere. So, I did miss out, but I gained so much in other ways.”
Because Cathy was still in her early 20s when she retired, she had pretty much her whole adult life ahead of her.
“I wasn’t daft, I got a job lined up before I retired,” she says. “I went to Arena swimwear as a promotions manager.
“I got a little flat in Leeds, I got a company car, and I looked after the GB squad and I was still part of that swimming world and I got paid. It was perfect.”
Now Cathy, whose parents have both passed away, works part-time as a sales manager for a utilities company and is loving her life on Merseyside with husband Dave.
She spends lots of quality time with her daughters Charlotte and Abi and their four young children as well as with Dave’s family.
Cathy keeps in touch with her old classmates from school and her daughters share her love of Teesdale after spending their childhood staying with their grandmother in Startforth.
“My girls love Barney, always have done and always will,” Cathy confirms.
“It’s got a special place in everyone’s hearts and when they were little and I was working they used to spend half terms with mum in Teesdale Road.”
