Former Gisborne swimmer Laura Quilter is once again wearing the New Zealand cap – 11 years after competing at the Commonwealth Games.
Eleven years after she competed at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, former Gisborne swimmer Laura Quilter is back on the international stage.
Quilter is competing for New Zealand in the women’s 50 metres freestyle and 50 metres butterfly at the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore.
At 33, she is rich in life experience, a novice in world championship competition and swimming faster than ever.
Her parents, Sue and Murray Quilter, travelled from Gisborne to Singapore to be there for her races in the butterfly on Friday and possibly Saturday, and in the freestyle Saturday and possibly Sunday.
Meanwhile, Quilter’s coaches from her Gisborne days – Pat Merrifield, Greg Meade and Dion Williams – are following her progress from afar.
Merrifield, 81, has been helping people to be comfortable in the water for over 60 years. She started at the age of 19 as a London public swimming pool lifeguard and was encouraged to get her coaching qualifications by the resident coach, who was impressed with her eye for faults in technique and how they could be fixed.
Merrifield still goes to the Kiwa Pools most days to work with swimmers on “stroke correction”.
“Anyone I take has to be able to swim 25 metres,” she said this week.
Learn-to-swim lessons were among her responsibilities when Laura Quilter came under her influence. But it was Merrifield’s advice on stroke correction that sticks in Quilter’s mind.
“Pat was instrumental in my swimming development,” she said.
“I had moved up a squad with Comet Swimming Club. I went from being among the fastest to being the slowest in my group. I’d always had quite a long stroke, and I started to panic and my stroke shortened.
“I had some private lessons with Pat, and she helped me improve my technique.”
Comet club founder Beth Meade (Greg’s mother) had recruited Pat Merrifield from London. They had a family connection and Beth thought Pat would be the ideal person to run Comet’s operation at the newly heated Elgin School pool. She came from Forest Hill, near Dulwich, in southeast London where she taught swimming at a local pool. She arrived in Gisborne in October 1997.
Merrifield saw an opportunity for water safety classes for babies and preschoolers.
“I got in touch with all the kindies and they started booking classes during the day,” she said.
She still gets “chased” by old students who want her to teach their children what she taught them ... tips like having loose lips for breathing out underwater, and likening it to the big bad wolf huffing, puffing and blowing down the house of the three little pigs.
The fun element is part of what Quilter has tried to incorporate in her own training, her coaching and in her Aura Move Instagram account. She has also been a “Swimfluencer” for the New Zealand Ocean Swim Series.
Quilter, who attended St Mary’s Primary School and Campion College, began her pool journey at Comet Swimming Club and won her first national age-group titles as a 14-year-old in 50m butterfly and 50m freestyle.
As she moved through the club’s competitive grades, Greg Meade was “like a second dad”, Quilter said.
“Laura was always striving to do things better and improve her technique and her overall training,” Meade said this week.
“Initially she probably didn’t have a great deal of confidence in herself, but as time went on she found she was good enough to win events, set records and achieve targets ... she developed from there.
“She was pretty much an out-and-out sprinter – pure speed – in butterfly, freestyle and backstroke, and a fantastic worker. She’d never miss a session and never shirk on any of the sets. Sometimes she’d ask if she could do a little bit extra and on a regular basis would do a proper warm-down.
“She’d do everything by the book, rather than cut a few pages out of it, and always felt she could go a little bit better.”
At swimming meets, coaches would quiz Meade on his training methods, particularly in relation to butterfly stroke, and he was invited to give sessions at clubs in other centres. When he said he did nothing out of the ordinary, they’d point to Quilter’s performances and say he must be doing something right.
Meade was Quilter’s pool coach for about 10 years, until she was 18 and moved to Auckland – the nerve centre of New Zealand competitive swimming.
Quilter became an Aquablack when she qualified for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. She made the semifinals in the 50m butterfly and was in the 4x100m freestyle relay team who finished fourth.
She left competitive swimming in 2016.
“I trialled for the Olympics and was quite far off the standard,” Quilter said. “I’d achieved the goals I’d set and just felt it was time to get on with my life ... get a career and all that sort of stuff.”
Alongside her pool swimming, Quilter was a “Black Fin”, representing New Zealand at the 2012, 2014 and 2016 lifesaving world championships. In 2016 she won the 50m manikin carry.
She cites surf lifesaving coach Dion Williams as an influence.
“He brought so much fun and joy into being out in the surf, it helped me realise that to enjoy the whole experience is really important.”
Williams, head coach at Wainui Surf Lifesaving Club, has been coaching for 20 years and his approach is encompassed in the rules he sets for the squads he takes away: try hard, have fun and make three new mates.
“They have to tell me the names of their new friends and something about them,” he said this week.
“It works. Sport is not just about the winners.
“Laura was easy to coach because she took what you said on board. Greg trained Laura to swim. I trained Laura in the skills she needed to be good in the ocean.”
He recalled the women’s under-19 surf race final of the national surf lifesaving champs in Gisborne when the conditions were “humongous”.
“When you get to the cans, swim hard right and you won’t be up against the rip,” he told her.
She executed the plan and won the race “because of the skill she had developed”.
“She trained massively hard in the pool. I’d get her training in the surf and she’d have fun and learn skills.”
While Quilter stepped away from the intensity of competitive swim training, she continued swimming for pleasure.
“I trained [in the pool] with my triathlon squad once a week and got really strong in the gym,” she said.
“I retrained in 2020 at the Auckland University of Technology and qualified as a registered nurse. I did the shortened two-year master’s course – I’d previously done a degree through Massey University – and in 2022 I started working as a registered nurse at Shorecare Urgent Clinic in Auckland.”
Swimming never released its hold on her, though.
“I love technique and finding new ways to help people understand it. I started the Instagram page to share my ideas. It’s an extension of my obsession with swimming. You feel weightless when you swim. It’s almost active meditation.
“I am a sprinter but I completed one kilometre in 2.1-degree water last year. It’s called ice swimming and you have to complete a full medical and ECG (electrocardiogram) before you race. A lot of medical support is poolside and they will pull you out if they’re concerned about your health. I had over 20 hot-water bottles packed around me after it.
“It was just a challenge, a bit of fun because I hate the cold ... more of a mental battle. You have no control of your recovery. You are shaking and hoping at some point you will feel normal again.”
She is not sure why she’s now swimming faster than ever, but she believes her increased emphasis on weight training has a lot to do with it. Her reduction in pool time has also made her think about ways to compress training benefits into shorter periods in the water.
“I’ve also gained maturity. I want to be here but swimming doesn’t rule my life. It’s not the biggest and only thing. I’m in the workforce. I have a fiance. I’ve gained a lot of strength. I think I battled a lot with nutrition when I was younger, and that could have made a difference. I am eight kilograms heavier than when I raced at the Commonwealth Games.”
You might say Quilter’s return to the New Zealand team came about because of the way her technique and training methods evolved, and a happy combination of events.
The opening of the Hawke’s Bay Regional Aquatic Centre in Hastings in September 2022 was the spur to Quilter’s return to competitive swimming.
“I wanted to swim in the new pool,” she said.
“They were hosting the New Zealand Masters swimming champs there in May 2023. I competed, and swam faster than I expected [in freestyle, butterfly and backstroke]. I was swimming only once a week but I was much stronger than I used to be.
“I wanted to see if I could swim faster than before.”
In 2024 she set a personal best after eight weeks of training. She also set world masters records in the 50m butterfly and 50m freestyle, although the freestyle mark was bettered soon afterwards.
The New Zealand team members for the World Aquatic Championships were announced after the national champs in May this year.
Quilter had finished second in the women’s 50m freestyle and backstroke and third in the 50m butterfly. Her butterfly time was under the qualifying mark for the world champs, but only two swimmers from each country can qualify for an event.
The woman with the fastest butterfly time chose not to go to the world champs, which allowed Quilter to take her spot. Quilter gets to swim the 50m freestyle as well because she went under a “B” standard.
Now, at 33, she’s plunging into fresh water.