Michael Gunning: ‘It’s only recently that I’ve been proud to say I’m a swimmer’

Little drops of water run down Michael Gunning’s face, looking less like tears than moving reminders of all he has been through as an international swimmer who just happens to be black and gay in a straight white world. Gunning has swum for Great Britain and Jamaica, one of the most dangerously homophobic countries on the planet, but he is now back in the garden of his childhood home in Orpington, Kent, on a beautiful morning.

“I’m nervous but excited,” Gunning says, “because I’ve got so much more to give the world. I haven’t achieved all I wanted in my career but, now I’m retiring from competitive swimming, I don’t feel I failed. Yes, I haven’t qualified for the Olympics or won that world title. But the amount of lives that I’ve impacted means more to me than medals.”

Gunning pushes his swimming goggles above his forehead and, during our photoshoot, he tries to stop his face cracking open into a brilliant smile which is full of joy and pride. He is meant to look straight down the barrel of the lens but he can’t help himself. That smile keeps returning even though we have spent 90 minutes talking about some harrowing subjects.

The 28-year-old Gunning has remembered how, when he was a schoolboy just down the road, he used to write The Swimmer, rather than his name, at the end of his assignments. It was one way to blur his identity and avoid the boys who threw acid at him. He buried his real self and did not have his first sexual experience until he was deep into his 20s.

That did not stop people warning him, during a swimming competition in Dubai, that he should walk more like a straight white man. It was similar to the casual racism which made so many people question whether a black person could swim at the highest