S9, Ep2: Ellie Simmonds, Paralympian

Comfort Eating with Grace Dent

The Guardian

Arts, Food

4.5 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on Comfort Eating, Grace is joined by five-time Paralympic gold medalist Ellie Simmonds. At 30, Ellie has hung up her goggles and retired from swimming, but instead of claiming an early pension, she has turned her hand to disability activism and documentary making – in 2024 she won a Bafta for her documentary Finding My Secret Family. She talks to Grace about the food that sustained her gruelling swim training schedule, her celebratory McDonald’s order during the Paralympics, and her secret recipe for orange scones. Ellie also opens up about accusations of bullying within British Para-Swimming in the buildup to Rio 2016

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The Guardian.
0:07.6	I'm Grace Dent and this is comfort eating from The Guardian.
0:13.6	A podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life.
0:19.5	Because even as a restaurant critic,
0:21.8	I believe the food that matters most
0:24.1	is often that snack you cobble together
0:26.8	when you're curled upon the sofa.
0:29.3	Each week, I ask my guest to lift the lid
0:32.6	on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives.
0:36.0	Because you can tell a lot about a person
0:38.8	from what they eat behind closed doors.
0:45.3	Hello friends. You find me packing my suitcase. As I await my Paralympian guest,
0:57.0	it's the swimmer, Ellie Simmons.
1:00.0	I better finish this off because as of tomorrow,
1:03.0	I'm going to be spending some time in Birmingham
1:05.4	to film a new TV job.
1:08.1	I'm going to be up there for a few weeks.
1:10.1	Put...
1:10.5	OMG! The packing. Oh! a new TV job. I'm going to be up there for a few weeks. I'm going to be up there for a few weeks.
1:12.6	The packet.
1:14.9	I always say when I'm doing this, you need far less than you think.
1:21.4	There are some non-negotiables.
	...

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