Almost Synchro the coldest, kindest world record attempt I've photographed

Back on Saturday 25 January 2025 I spent a bright, bitter morning at Tooting Bec Lido watching Almost Synchro go for a Guinness World Record. I've sat on these photos ever since. There's no good reason for that other than life gets busy, and it always felt like the sort of thing that deserved doing properly rather than rushed. So here they are at last, because what these swimmers did that morning was worth remembering.

It was part of the UK Cold Water Swimming Championships, run by South London Swimming Club at Tooting Bec, the largest outdoor lido in the country and a million gallons of freshwater ringed by bare winter trees. The Champs were back for the first time since 2019 after lockdown and a long renovation, and the place was heaving. Storm Éowyn had come through in the days before, but on the morning itself the sun was out and the sky was a hard clean blue.

If you don't know them, Almost Synchro are a group of 20 Bristol swimmers who perform open water synchronised swimming. They came together in 2019 for a mass synchro performance to mark the centenary of Henleaze Swimming Lake, and when the pandemic passed a smaller group kept meeting, kept practising, and the team we have now was born, ballet leg first as they like to put it. They perform all year round, in lakes, rivers, lidos and the sea, on the land and in the water, and they'll happily use a routine to make a point about water pollution or the right to safe, accessible places to swim.

My first encounter with Almost Synchro, front cover fame

The record they were chasing was for the coldest water. The catch is you don't just have to perform, the water has to be cold enough to count, below 5 degrees, and on the day it came in at between 5 - 5.7 depending who you ask. Bright winter sun, a still morning and Storm Éowyn already gone, and the temperature sat just the wrong side of the line. So the record didn't get ratified. What actually happened, though, was a group of swimmers holding a full synchronised routine in 5 ish degree water in front of a big crowd, and not one of them let it show on their face. That's the bit I wanted to photograph.

I got there early for the quiet part, which is usually my favourite. Swimmers pulling on silver sequinned caps, a bit of colour on the cheeks, scarves and big coats over swimming costumes, everyone half laughing and half bracing themselves. I shot a set of portraits in that hour, close and simple, because faces before a cold swim tell you everything you need to know about nerve. Then the coats came off and the whole team lined up along the poolside in matching white costumes and white caps, waving to the crowd, and you'd never have guessed what the water was about to ask of them.

The performance itself is all speed. I shot the formations wide to keep the whole team in, the line of them threading across the pool, and then went in for the ballet legs, that moment where the legs come straight up out of the surface all together and the water throws up in front of them. Cold water doesn't give you many chances at a frame like that, so it's fast and creative or nothing. My favourite of the set is the wide one of the full team in formation with the crowd, dryrobes and bunting behind them and the bare trees over the top. It puts the whole thing in one frame, a proper crowd, a hard cold morning, and twenty people making it look easy.

I don't think the paperwork matters much in the end. Almost Synchro turned up on a freezing January morning, performed beautifully in water that was 0.7 of a degree off letting them into the record books, and gave a big crowd something to remember. Record or no record, that's an achievement, and it's overdue that these photos see the light.

You can follow Almost Synchro on Instagram at @openwatersynchro and find them at almostsynchro.com, and the day itself was put on by South London Swimming Club at Tooting Bec, @slsclido. If you were there, or you're in the water in any of these, do get in touch.

Photography: Roger Taylor Photography — rogertaylorphotography.co.uk