Bathurst Swim Club's Caleb Cashman wins gold at Australian Age Swimming Championships

Cashman's years of dedication to training and perfect preparation for last week's Adelaide event led him to an under 14s boys 400 metre individual medley gold medal, making him Bathurst's first national age champion on record.

He entered the championships with the nation's second best qualifying time and went into last Wednesday's final with the third-best performance from the heats, where he swam a time of four minutes and 54.01 seconds.

Cashman saved his best performance for the race that mattered most as he swam a time 4:50.63 to win by 0.58 seconds.

It was a special race for not just Cashman but the Bathurst Swim Club, who also had Alex Davies competing in the final.

Davies produced a big personal best performance in the preliminaries (5:00.11) to join his teammate in the medal race and almost matched that time again to finish the final in eighth.

The butterflies were in the stomach for Cashman going into the final.

"I did doubt myself a little because I knew I was up there with those boys but I hadn't been in that position before. I was a bit stressed going in but so excited that I could come away with a medal," Cashman said.

"I felt very comfortable during the first leg in the butterfly and I knew I was right up there with them.

"I knew that the others were stronger than me in the freestyle, and most of the boys there are long distance freestylers so they had that back end on me. I knew I had to get out ahead in the breaststroke and lead them going into the freestyle."

After sitting midfield at the end of the butterfly Cashman then moved up the field on the backstroke to put himself into second place at the halfway point, but with nearly three seconds to make up on fastest qualifier Daniel Carter.

Cashman utilised a strong breaststroke leg two give himself almost a two second advantage.

However, another rival, Hamish Harris, produced the best breaststroke leg of all swimmers to put himself right in the mix and set up a great three-way fight for the gold medal.

Carter continually ate into Cashman's advantage over the freestyle leg, as expected, but the Bathurst swimmer called upon every energy reserve he had to stake his claim on the title.

"I knew I was ahead but aware that they were catching up on me fast so I was just trying to get as quickly as I could to that wall. I couldn't feel anything in my shoulders and couldn't think at all. I was absolutely gone," Cashman said.

"I couldn't believe I got the gold medal at first. It took me a long time to process it and the fact that I was a national champion.

"I'd gone in feeling prepared. I'd been training for months and working very hard for it. After flying home it all sunk in and I thought 'I really just did that'."

Not many people were cheering home Cashman harder than his Bathurst Swim Club coach Josh Stapley.

"I've never been so stressed and excited in my career. It was a huge highlight," he said.

"It was an amazing thing to know that we had so many people backing us in there. I think every NSW coach on pool deck was cheering him home over that final 100m.

"We readjusted the plan a bit going into the final and he executed it to perfection. We knew he'd need to lead by a couple of seconds going into the freestyle and he put himself into that position. It was pure grit and determination from there that got him home."

Along with Cashman and Davies, Bathurst had Nikki Browne, Sienna Whalan and Tyler Johnson qualify for the championships.

Stapley said the entire Bathurst squad had reasons to feel proud of their efforts in the pool.

"For Bathurst having five athletes qualify was great, and then to have two athletes in the same final was impressive," he said.

"Alex dropped 16 seconds to make the final and then jumped up two more spots in the final. He's definitely a big stage swimmer and took it to another level. He pulled huge PBs to move up a lot of spots through the week.

"Nikki and Tyler were at their first age nationals. Having only just qualified we knew there probably wasn't going to be much going on, since they had to PB to reach nationals, and they both swam really great times.

"Sienna was really unlucky to miss finals as well. She grabbed a PB in her 200m breaststroke and that was her first time doing that for that race in about 12 months so that was awesome for her."

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