Capital swimmer Dan Wallace announces his retirement

Wallace, who turns 25 at the weekend, won two bronze medals on the Gold Coast with the 4x100m and 4x200m freestyle relay teams.

Those followed an individual gold and silver, and relay silver, from Glasgow 2014, as well as a World Championships relay gold and Olympics relay silver.

He said: “I am obviously very excited about the next chapter, it’ll be hard to say goodbye to swimming, but my last race was a great experience.

“There is obviously a lot of emotion flying round now, once the dust settles I really have to think where I want to take my next step.

“My first thoughts are that the future won’t involve swimming, but I want to keep my options open as I have a lot of knowledge of the sport from 15 years of perfecting my craft.

“I have a lot to give, it might not be performances in the pool, but if it is coaching or mentoring then who knows, I will keep the options open.

“Swimming has been such a big part of my life and maybe I want to move away from that and do something completely different.

“I’d like to be a host at events and entertain that way.”

Wallace made the decision to retire after this showpiece event some three months ago.

“When I was at Glasgow 2014 I was young and doing all these great things, but you honestly don’t think about it, it is just how it is, but this week I thought you will never have 12,000 people shouting for you again.

“When you are doing these things you sometimes don’t appreciate them, but I have done things that most people haven’t experienced.

“I made the decision to stop about three months ago. I didn’t want to leave it until my last swim because then you base the decision on emotion. I was ready mentally, so I set the date and thought that’ll be it to give me some clarity.

“I didn’t want to be one of those guys that dragged it out and kept chasing times, the goals. In the last few years I have achieved everything I wanted to achieve so it was a bit easier for me.”