Three current Swansea University students and five former students took part in the Games: 

• Swimming:  Alys Thomas, Jazz Carlin, Georgia Davies, Ellena Jones, Alex Rosser
• Lawn bowls:  Anwen Butten
• Hurdles: Caryl Granville
• Hockey: Jacob Draper

Profiles of all our athletes

Swansea University athletes won 3 of Team Wales’ medals at the Games, all in the pool:

• Gold:   Alys Thomas, 200m butterfly
• Bronze: Georgia Davies, 50m backstroke
• Bronze:  women’s 4 x 100m medley relay (Alys Thomas and Georgia Davies in team)

Gold medal winner Alys Thomas graduated from Swansea University in 2015 with a degree in Psychology. 

She explained how she was able to balance her studies with her rigorous training regime, which consists of up to nine 2 hour pool sessions, and three gym sessions, each week:

“The University’s location is really good.  I could walk straight across the road from the pool to my lectures.  

There’s a lot of organisation and communication too, which means you can balance your workload and training.

It makes it easy to swim at your best and get a good degree. 

You’d go to America for a place like this.”

Steve Joel, Swansea University Head of Sport, said:

“Our congratulations go to all our students, past and present, who represented their country in the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.  They have done Swansea and Wales proud.  

The sporting facilities we offer at Swansea University are first class.  Our medal-winning swimmers trained at the High Performance Centre at the Wales National Pool Swansea within the Swansea University International Sports Village.  

We are delighted to announce that we have recently renewed and strengthened our partnership with Swim Wales which will enable us to ensure the Swansea University High Performance Centre will continue to help the best student swimmers reach their full potential through sport scholarships, the very best coaching, sports science services, physiotherapy, athlete lifestyle support and strength and conditioning training.

We also work hard to help athletes find the right balance between their studies and their sport, so they don’t have to choose one or the other. 

Swansea University has a nationally recognised reputation for swimming excellence, achieving significant success at the highest levels of the major British Universities and Colleges Sport (BUCS) competitions.  We are looking forward to developing our range of focus sport high performance programmes in conjunction with our national governing body of sport partners in future.”

Find out more about Sport at Swansea