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Ellie Simmonds has broken down in tears while writing a letter to her birth mother.

The Paralympic gold-medal winning swimmer, who also starred on the last season of Strictly with Nikita Kuzmin, only recently revealed she was adopted at just three-months-old.

Born in Walsall, Ellie, 28, began swimming when she was five years old, and was just 13 when she won two gold medals for Great Britain at the 2008 Summer Paralympics in Beijing.

Ellie, who has achondroplasia, is now retired, and recently turned her focus to finding her birth family, a journey that has been captured by cameras for the documentary Finding My Secret Family.

During filming, Ellie discovered the confronting reality of why she was given up at just 10 days old, with her mum wishing she had died at birth after being told by medics that her daughter would be seen as ‘evil’ and ‘stupid’.

Ahead of meeting her birth mother for the first time, Ellie decided to write her a letter.

Reading out some of her notes to the camera, she said: ‘I’m going to tell her I’ve always known I was adopted from the start. I’m going to say I had photos of them, that I lived an incredible life.’

‘These are all bullet points. This is a big thing, the first letter. I’m going to tell her when I read the adoption notes it says you love being outdoors and are into horses and it’s funny because I love them.

‘I know from the photos I have you had curly hair, do you still have curly hair? I do, it’s lovely but it’s hard to manage.’

She continued: ‘I’m going to say I’m definitely not angry. I hope you understand that. I hope I can get to know you and find out about you. It seems like we have the same personality, again it might have changed now.’

It was at this point that Ellie then became emotional, tearing up before saying she didn’t know ‘why I’m crying’.

Elsewhere in the documentary, Ellie was able to read through her hospital records with the assistance of a specialist social worker and was horrified at what she saw.

After giving birth, Ellie’s mother was handed an information sheet which claimed children with dwarfism ‘have to deal with being stared at and laughed at by other children’ and that ‘indeed, there are those with normal height who equate short stature with evil and stupidity’.

Reflecting on how quickly she was given up for adoption, Ellie also said that there had not been a long amount of time taken to ‘decide a massive, monumental thing’.

But sympathising with her birth mother, she commented on the fact she was a single parent, and so tried to place herself ‘in her shoes’.

While it is not shown on screen in the documentary, Ellie went on to meet her birth mother, whom she explained that she spent five hours speaking to when discussing the documentary on This Morning on Wednesday.

‘I was so nervous, and we were supposed to meet and I got a migraine and had to cancel, but the second time I got to meet her, but that first moment we just embraced and hugged and it was the most amazing feeling,’ she said.

She went on to say that while she initially only wanted to spend 15 minutes chatting, that blew out when the conversation started flowing.

Ellie Simmonds: Finding My Secret Family airs tonight at 9pm on ITV.

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