A British woman has died as she tried to swim across the English Channel to raise money for sick children.
Susan Taylor, 34, died as she neared the end of a charity swim across the English Channel
Susan Taylor, a 34-year-old accountant from Barwell, Leicestershire, was just a mile from the coast of France when she became ill on Sunday afternoon.
A French navy helicopter flew her to hospital in Boulogne-sur-Mer but she was declared dead at around 7pm.
Ms Taylor had set off from the UK in the early hours of Sunday morning and was raising money for Diabetes UK and the Rainbows Children’s Hospice in Loughborough.
She was swimming alongside a support boat and had temporarily given up her office job to train for the gruelling 21-mile swim across one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.
But as she entered Wissant Bay, near Cap Gris-Nez, she got into ‘serious difficulty’, said a French police source.
Ms Taylor’s support crew requested a defibrillator by radio, and the French Navy evacuated her to hospital in Boulogne.
‘She was swimming from Britain, and was well supported,’ said the police source in Boulogne-sur-Mer, who said the emergency call was made soon after 5pm.
It was an extremely hot day with the water temperature at 15C.
Ms Taylor had set off at night – at around 1am on Sunday – and was covered in goose fat in preparation for a swim of around 15 hours.
Before the swim, Ms Taylor had told the Hinckley Times: ‘I used to be with the St John Ambulance and I met a woman who said to me “you’ll swim the Channel one day”’.
By this morning, Ms Taylor had raised more than £2,700 for her charities on her Virgin Money Giving page.
British officials had authorised a number of charity swimmers to cross the Channel on Sunday.
France does not allow such swims to start from its own side of the Channel because of the dangers posed by shipping, as well as dangerous currents and changing weather conditions.
Channel swimming is an extreme sport, yet, until Sunday, only seven people had died since Captain Matthew Webb made the first unassisted swim across the Strait of Dover in 1875.
The last swimmer to die before Ms Taylor was Paraic Casey, a 45-year-old member of the Sandycove Swimming Club in Cork, Ireland, almost exactly a year ago, on July 21 2012.
Like Ms Taylor, Mr Casey became ill less than a mile from the French coast, and all attempts to resuscitate him failed.
A friend of Ms Taylor, who asked not to be named, said today: ‘We are devastated by Susan’s death. She was a wonderful person who was determined to swim the Channel so as to help others.’
