Ellie Simmonds clinches World Championships gold medal in 400m freestyle

The 18-year-old, of Aldridge, won in the 400m freestyle last night.

The Paralympian claimed gold by a stunning 20 seconds as she won the first of her six events last night.

Simmonds clocked five minutes 24.02 seconds, well ahead of Mexico's Vianney Trejo and Brazil's Susana Ribeiro.

The 18-year-old won Paralympic gold in the S6 400m at last year's London Olympics and admitted she felt the pressure to perform again. "It was just me but you push yourself and your own ability," she said.

"I was still really nervous. I felt less pressure than London but I was just going out there to race myself and that's a bit harder in a way because I'm a racer: I'm born to race."

Simmonds also races in the 100m backstroke, 100m breaststroke, 50m and 100m freestyle and 200m individual medley.

Her main rival, American Victoria Arlen, was stopped from competing after the IPC ruled she did not have a permanent disability.

Arlen is a former champion swimmer who was left paralysed from the waist down in 2006 by a virus that affected her spinal cord and left her in a vegetative state for two years. She beat

Simmonds in the S6 100m freestyle final in London, after winning an appeal against a judgement which ruled her impairment was not severe enough to qualify. She was one of the favourites for gold in Montreal and only found out she could not compete 24 hours after arriving. "I'm heartbroken," she said.

Meanwhile, Britain's Josef Craig and Jessica-Jane Applegate set world records to win their S7 400m and S14 200m freestyle races and Steph Millward won the S9 100m freestyle.

Craig broke his own world record to win the S7 400m freestyle final by 0.05 seconds in 4:39.14, with Jonathan Fox taking the bronze in 4:44.46.

Applegate, 16, emulated her London triumph with gold in the S14 200m freestyle, clocking a world-record time of 2:09.88, while Millward won in 1:04.00.