LAUREN COX is using the pain of missing out on the 2024 Paris Olympics to fuel her drive for future success.

The 24-year-old was heartbroken when she failed to make the qualifying time in the 100-metre backstroke and, as a result, the Great Britain team two summers ago and she even contemplated turning her back on swimming during the break which followed.

However, she now has her sights set firmly on Los Angeles 2028, boosted by the inclusion of the 50m backstroke, breaststroke and butterfly events over her favoured distance.

Asked how much of a driver that disappointment is ahead of next week’s 2026 Aquatics GB Swimming Championships, Cox said: “It’s a massive one because I don’t want to feel like that again.

“When I’m finding it hard in training or I think about just packing it in or whatever it might be, I do think back to that moment when I touched the wall, remembered how bad I felt.

“I don’t want to even give myself the slight inkling of having that again, because being out of breath in training and feeling all that like lactate or whatever isn’t as bad as what I felt back in 2024.”

A gold medallist in the 100m backstroke at the European Short Course Championships in Lublin last year, Cox has a fresh perspective on her swimming career, a process which has been aided in no small part by former world and Olympic champion Adam Peaty, who is back in action this week at the British Championships.

She combines her training regime at Loughborough University with her role as an AP Race ambassador, working with young swimmers and at the same time, gleaning advice from a man who has scaled the heights in the sport.

Cox said: “I’d say I started working with him in 2024 and he probably mentored me more than he realised.

“We did some interviews before the AP Race London International last year and him and [former training partner] Ed [Baxter] were interviewing me about missing the Olympics.

“After I finished speaking and all the cameras were off, he was, ‘You just need to believe in yourself a bit more’ and gave me some advice, and that really meant a lot to me because when I was younger, and still now, I do look up to him quite a lot.”

There has also been a psychological shift for Cox since her Olympic disappointment.

She said: “At that time, I was a student as well and I’d always felt like I was missing out on normal student life, so when I didn’t make the Olympics, I was, ‘Well, now I get to be a regular person and do all the things I feel like I’m missing out on’, and it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be in the end.

“But now since I’ve taken that break and got to live, all the sacrifices I’ve made […] feel less like sacrifices.”