When you think about surprises at Britain’s Olympic trials, there are few that surpass the men’s’ 1500m. Many followers of British swimming would never even had heard of Tim Shuttleworth before that competition, but here he was swimming himself onto the Olympic team with a huge personal best and a maiden voyage beneath 15 minutes.

It was a result that perhaps surprised the man himself, even if it was tempered by the closeness to the automatic Olympic qualifying time, which was missed by just 0.12 of a second. “I couldn’t believe I’ve just swum that fast. I was buzzing that I’d swum the time, but I was so close to the automatic time” he reflects. “I knew the qualifying time to the 100th so when I saw the time it was a mix of emotions; I look back to the pictures actually and I’m sort of like, awww just missed it!” But that feeling didn’t last too long. “Afterwards I realised it doesn’t matter, I’ve just done a 20 second PB, so after that I was just ecstatic really.”

It might have been agonisingly close to getting an automatic plane on the ticket, but the result was well inside the 2% cut off that was used for secondary selection. Not that it made the wait any easier “I tried not to think about it, I tried to just put out my mind for the break that there was before the team was announced” he says. I thought that if I keep thinking about it I’m just going to torture myself so I just thought to put out my mind and try to relax and just think about other things, just… and then when the team was announced I was just really happy!”

There had been signs that a big drop was coming from Shuttleworth in the lead up to trials, following a move from Hatfield to Loughborough University last September. Already in the season he had dropped his 1500m personal best form 15:52 in March 2015 to 15:15 a year later. Much of that has to do with his training with Kevin Renshaw at the NTC but foundations were laid back in Hatfield.

Ian Wright, now head coach at City of Glasgow, was Hatfield head coach to a younger Shuttleworth and recalls him as a typical teenager, but was convinced he had the right stuff about him. “He was going to be really good one day if he stuck at it as he had the technique in place and the physique that would be a huge advantage when it finally kicked in in terms of height and suitable strength” recalls Wright, noting a first lot of rapid improvements. “As the months went on, he started to make significant and then very rapid progress in both training and open water” progress that led to an international open water call up and a first meeting with Renshaw. Tim was already keen on a degree at Loughborough and Wright petitioned Renshaw to take a chance on him in the NTC squad. The Loughborough coach liked what he saw and the rest, as they say, is history.

“When I joined Loughborough and I started training I knew it was very hard but I had a chat with Kevin at the start” says Shuttleworth. “He sat me down and he said if you buy into the program as people have done in the past, then there is potential for you to do something special. And at that point I knew I just had to buy into the program really and just believe in it, and I do.”

That’s reflected in what his coaches see as a more mature attitude. “In terms of my training I feel like I get knuckled down a lot more, I put 100% into every set and if that constitutes being more mature then yeah” he shrugs. “And I feel like I don’t do anything now that would compromise my training”.

It took a few months for the effects to be felt, with big time drops at the start of 2016 at the BUCS Championships and again at the Wycombe open meet, but it’s not just training hard, there are other aspects to his improvement from the technical side “It’s just more things like my catch of the water just small technical things that I’m changing, that help with every stroke and just gaining more power through the water”, while training in some international company is another bonus. “It pushes me on in training everyday so now I turn up to training and I have the likes of Jack Burnell, Caleb Hughes, I’m training with Toby Robinson, I had Dan Fogg for all of this season as well” he says. “They push me in the training everyday so you turn up to training knowing that you have a hard set in front of you and swimmers next to you that you know are going to be swimming really fast and it’s like a mini competition, you push each other forward, that’s the mindset of the group.”

That drive continues to push him towards the Olympics where Shuttleworth is keen for people to know he isn’t going to just make up the numbers. “When I rest again, I know I can swim a lot faster” he says, thinking about a potential finals appearance in Rio. “I can’t really control what others do and I know they are going to be fast, but I know I can be fast as well. I’m not sure how close I can get to the final but I know I have the capability to do it”.

“I don’t want to put a limit to what I can do. If I say a time it’s sort of like putting a limit, so I go into a competition with an open mind, so it’s like anything is possible. Obviously you know what sort of time you can swim from what you’re used to doing in training, but you don’t put a limit on it and then anything can happen.”