Peter Prijdekker
Swimming

Peter Prijdekker competed in the 1972 Olympics in Munich

From Gus Cairns of Positive Nation Online:

Peter Prijdekker doesn't look like a swimmer. What is conjured up by the phrase 'swimmer's build' is the dolphin archetype - sleek, narrow hips, able to slip through the waves, all the power coming from the shoulders. But the man who answers his front door in a Clapham side street looks more like a bull - big, meaty, a rugby forward. You imagine him battering his way through the water through sheer determination. The whole house is full of sporting memorabilia.

"I have three or four hundred different medals, just stacked in boxes. I'm going to frame the ones I'm proudest of and have a storage cabinet built for the rest," he says. The seven he won in the Gay Games in Amsterdam in August rest casually on their own cushion.

It is easy to be misled by this impressive record, and the physical presence of the man - especially as 50 years have added cragginess to size. But as Peter talks, and endures conspicuous discomfort as his photo is taken, a quite different person emerges - shy, honourable, with no trace of a champion's arrogance. "I find it difficult to smile for photos," he admits. "I've got one of those faces that always looks serious."

Living with HIV has given Peter plenty to be serious about. The virus has intensified the issues any athlete faces when age starts to erode the personal best, as well as dumping bereavement and illness in your lap. Yet his is also a testimony to the extraordinarily warm and HIV-friendly environment that is the gay sporting movement (which took 15,000 athletes to Amsterdam), and in particular his corner of it, the UK group Out to Swim.

Peter's  lover Ron died in 1990, not long after Peter's diagnosis. Ron was a fellow sportsman - his speciality was tennis - whom Peter met at his old athletics club in Ealing in 1982. He clearly still misses Ron, and has not found a replacement. "I've only had one rather unsatisfactory relationship since. It lasted three years, because I'm the kind of person who works really hard at relationships, but we both came in with an awful lot of luggage. In the last nine years I've become very independent. Age makes you keener to get your own needs right first."

Ron's death brought Peter to Out to Swim. "Ron was diagnosed in 1988, and got ill really quickly; within 18 months he was gone. I was devastated. Although our relationship was known about at Ealing, they sent no letter of condolence or anything to me, nor to his family. I vowed never to go back there again. I hope 10 years further on it would happen better but it made me decide to move to a club where I could be open about my status."

For Peter, Out to Swim strikes the right balance. It supports serious sporting endeavour: "It's OK there to be thoroughly competitive and strive for one's personal best." But it is also Peter's place where he can party. "Out to Swim attracts a lot of people who don't go to bars and want a different way of meeting people. We beat a Royal Navy relay team at the Southern Counties Championship this year and they said: 'You guys are always having such fun.'"

Peter has swum competitively since he was 11. Though Dutch, he was brought up in South Africa. Moving back to the Netherlands, he joined the army there. "The world military champion-ships in Sicily in 1971 - all those soldiers - imagine!" He swam for the Dutch national team at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

"I was never Olympic medal standard. I was twenty-fourth out of 45 competitors. Because of that, I specialised in water polo for a while."

He moved to Britain in 1977 "following a man - who I'm still good friends with." He has never been tempted to return to Holland.

"Amsterdam is a village," he insists. "London is a truly international city. I like the ability to be anonymous here. It was strange to return home representing a British team, but I'm here to stay."

Was he out as gay when he competed in Munich? "I was out to myself and to friends. In the sports world there are a lot of gay men and women - perhaps more than the average - but it's very difficult to be out in sport because most people are young. What I mean is that many of those people aren't out as gay to themselves yet. You need to achieve a certain amount of maturity to do that. And, yes, there is a macho culture. In the evening, if the boys are saying, 'let's go and chat up the birds', it's pretty hard to say: 'Guys, that's just not my thing'."

Like many amateur athletes, Peter has had to spend a good deal of his income on his sport, and before becoming HIV positive somehow combined daily training with working in an airline office. Since 1992 he has only worked part-time in a shop, and the costs of going to athletic meetings have had to be partially met by sponsorship deals that Out to Swim has fixed up with Aussie Haircare and the HIV drug company Bristol-Myers Squibb. Peter still looks well, but has been on combination therapy for three years, starting when his CD4 count declined to 100. "It took me six months to decide to take the drugs because AZT had proved really toxic for Ron," he recalls. He has not had an easy ride with his drugs either. Peter takes two protease inhibitors, ritonavir and saquinavir, because reverse transcriptase inhibitors have given him irreversible peripheral neuropathy. "There's no way I could hold down a full-time job now, I can't stand for long enough." It comes as a surprise hearing this from such an apparently superfit man. How on earth does he manage to train?

"The kind of energy you need for sport is quite different from the stamina you need for a job. Swimming is fun, it enlivens me, it's what I've done for 40 years." Nonetheless, and despite saying he "hasn't felt this good in a long time," he has had to slow down recently. "I'm prone to depression, and I had a kind of breakdown last year. I was demanding too much of myself. Even though I was still training in the fast lane with guys 15 years younger than me, I had to face the fact that it was taking more and more effort to stay in the top level. I'm 50, I think I would have had to face this issue whether positive or not." Many of the world meetings, such as the Masters Championships, are organised in five-year age bands which enable people to remain competitive, "right up till they're 70-80 years old," without being unrealistic about maintaining youthful times.

"The last nine years have been an enormous learning experience about my capabilities. I have had to learn where to draw the line, to continue to challenge my personal best while not pushing through tiredness. The discipline of sport helps me - being competitive helps me win in the HIV competition - but these days I don't just train, train, train. I plan the year ahead so I can take holidays then get fit for the next Championships."

Anyway, Out to Swim provides so much more than an environment in which to be grimly competitive. Peter talks about the 'Pink Flamingos' spectaculars every team at the Gay Games is invited to devise as a five-minute closing routine. "At New York we did the queens of England, from Elizabeth I to Freddie Mercury. At San Diego, Diana had just died, so we did a serious routine: one of us swam down the pool trailing a 30-foot black ribbon, then the rest of us got in with a red one which we turned into the Aids ribbon. It was very emotional." Somehow the picture of this big ex-soldier trailing ribbons behind him sums up why the gay sporting movement has proved so liberating to its participants.