THE BEST OF 2010: Hannah Miley comes of age in Budapest

By David Jordan, Sportsbeat

HAD Hannah Miley not been competing in her third major competition in of the season this month, she would likely have spent the build-up to Christmas swimming breaststroke lengths with a sponge strapped to her body in a dilapidated public pool in sub-zero Inverurie.

FLYING SCOT: Hannah Miley captured her first major international individual gold medal at the European Championships in Budapest this summer (Reuters)

Despite already contending with a jam-packed four lane pool and water as choppy as the North Sea, a sodden sponge is only the beginning - the medley swimmer hones her other strokes with weights tagged on.

The brains behind these sessions is Miley's helicopter pilot father and swimming pioneer Patrick, who has coached his daughter since she was three.

Along the way he has invented the Aquapacer, an electronic transmitter that allows a coach to pace their charge's lengths and is a favourite of American superstar Michael Phelps, and for which Miley was, and still is, the guinea pig.

If the methods are extraordinary they were matched to the hilt by results in March 2009 when Miley raced through the 200m individual medley in 2:09.59 minutes to slice 1.09 seconds off Ukrainian Yana Klochova's nine-year-old European record.

The performance made Miley, the 19-year-old Corinthian, holder of both the European 200m and 400m medley records and a red-hot medal favourite heading into that summer's World Championships.

But in the Eternal City of Rome, Miley was thrown to the lions - finishing a heartbreaking fourth over 400m and losing her European record to Hungarian Katinka Hosszu, before trailing home a disappointing sixth over half the distance.