FORMER Olympic breaststroke champion David Wilkie has quit his local health club in disgust after being told off for swimming too fast in the pool.
Wilkie, who also held the 200 metre world record for eight years, was reprimanded for banging into a fellow swimmer.
He took umbrage with being told off as he claimed he was swimming in the “fast lane”.
The Scot then demanded to speak with the manager and told him he was cancelling his membership.
Wilkie, 62, who won gold in the 200m breaststroke at the 1976 Montreal Games, had been using the middle lane of five in the 25-metre pool at the Royal Berkshire Virgin Active club in Bracknell, Surrey.
He said: “I was just swimming as normal in the pool, doing front crawl, and the lifeguard came up to me and said, ‘I think you banged into somebody’.
“I said, ‘It’s the fast lane you know, this is rubbish’.”
Following the row with the lifeguard, Wilkie asked to speak to a senior member of staff and quit the £190-a-month club.
Wilkie, who swims about 60 lengths every day, said: “You go to a swimming pool to swim – not to have lifeguards coming and telling you how to swim. It’s ridiculous.”
A Virgin Active spokesman said:"We take any complaints we receive from our members seriously. We spoke with Mr Wilkie in 2015 to resolve his complaint and we were sorry to see him leave our Club."
Wilkie won the silver medal in the 200m breaststroke at the 1972 Olympics in Munich before claiming gold four years later in a world record time that stood for eight years. He also won silver in the 100m breaststroke in Montreal.
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