After Exploring NCAA Possibilities, Britain’s Top Breaststroker Chooses Loughborough

In a continuation of the British Swimming troll from earlier this year, British phenom Filip Nowacki and GB Aquatics posted a social media announcement on Wednesday that he had committed to swim at Loughborough University in England. He will begin training there in September 2026.

Loughborough University houses a National Performance Center as well as a non-NPC program more closely affiliated with university sports.

While the British collegiate sporting system is not as intense as the one in the United States, there is a collegiate championship meet called BUCS that many Loughborough swimmers participate in.

GB Aquatics, formerly known as British Swimming, has now twice boasted in this class about keeping its top prospects at home. Jacob Mills, who like Nowacki spent a lot of time exploring a move to the United States to train, was announced in November to be destined for Performance Centre in Manchester, England.

Nowacki, 18, first showed signs in 2023, breaking the British Age Record for 15 year olds in the 200 breaststroke in long course (2:16.05) and winning medals in all three breaststroke distances at the Commonwealth Youth Games.

In 2024, he won silver at the European Junior Championships in the 200 breaststroke.

Then, in 2025, he had his big breakthrough, winning gold in the 100 and 200 breaststroke at the World Junior Championships, along with a pair of relay medals. He also won five European Junior Championship medals, which included another breaststroke sweep.

A native of Jersey in the Channel Islands, he is a rare specimen out of the Crown Dependency with a population of just over 100,000, better known for cows than swimmers.

He represented Jersey at the Commonwealth Games, where different portions of Great Britain compete independently. Jersey has only won four medals ever at the Commonwealth Games, with none of them coming in swimming.

He began his career training at Tigers Jersey under Nathan Jegou before eventually moving to train under Keiron Piper at Millfield in England.

Nowacki’s Best Times

A very good short course swimmer, Nowacki would have undoubtedly been a star in the NCAA. The decision to stay home, though, allows him to focus on only breaststroke events without having to worry about finding a third event.

As time winds down on Adam Peaty’s career, the once-deep British breaststroking contingent has been left relatively-thin, though there is a lot of talent going forward.

Nowacki is the country’s best over the last 12 months in all three distances. In the 100, he’s one of three to have gone sub-minute last year, along with Gregory Butler (59.53, 25 years old) and Max Morgan (59.93, 17 years old). That is pretty much the trio at the top of the British breaststroking group right now, with the teens Nowacki and Morgan seeming most likely to take the team beyond 2028 – though Butler had never broken a minute prior to last year, so his best swims might still be ahead of him as well.

There’s also the matter of the World Record holder Adam Peaty, now in a new phase of his life, who was recently very-publicly married to Holly Ramsay, daughter of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, who says he will be back in time to race at next year’s Commonwealth Games after no long course swims in 2025 (he did appear at World Cup meets in short course meters).

As the United States rages on debates about what influence international swimmers should have in their collegiate system, the opposite sides of those debates are happening abroad as well. Federations love to see their top athletes stay home (and at varying times incentivize them to do so), and GB Aquatics has won two big ‘recruiting battles’ in 3 months.

And the decisions make sense by-and-large: almost all of their international success in the last decade has come from swimmers trained at home, including their best-in-class men’s 200 freestyle group, all of whom trained domestically in GB.