A Welsh international swimmer has been cleared of raping a woman who claimed he forced himself on her shortly after she had consensual sex with his friend. Otto Putland, 24, who represented Wales at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, denied raping the woman after a night out in July 2015. He was acquitted by a jury of seven women and five men at Cardiff crown court on Tuesday.

After hearing the verdict, Judge Jeremy Jenkins told Putland he was free to leave and thanked the jurors for the care and attention they had given the case.

The woman, who came forward in November 2016, said she went home with the Olympic swimmer Ieuan Lloyd after meeting him in a club and had consensual sex with him. She said when Putland entered the room and sat on the bed after Lloyd left, she made it clear she did not want to have sex again. She told him they could not “pass her around”, said “no” and turned her head away.

Putland, however, said her demeanour led to him kissing her and that she had returned his kisses. She did nothing to make him think that the subsequent sex was not consensual, he said.

In a video-recorded interview played to the jury, the woman said she met Lloyd, whom she had known for about a year, in a club and that they had spent most of the evening together before returning to his home. “We left his friend [Putland] in the club with another girl. Once we got back to Ieuan’s house we had sex,” she said.

Afterwards, she said, Lloyd left the bedroom and Putland came in. “When he started taking off his clothes, that’s when I texted my friend, saying: ‘Help, something might happen.’ He [Putland] lay on top of me and I was saying: ‘You can’t pass me around,’ and he said: ‘We’re not passing you around.’ I told him I didn’t want to have sex with him and he continued trying to kiss me.”

The woman claimed Putland put on a condom. She said she was crying and kept turning her head away. “He just put it in but he said to me: ‘Don’t worry, it’s just the tip.’ I used my arms to keep him at a distance and push him away. Ieuan walked in to grab something off the side of the table and he just walked straight back out again.”

The woman told Putland she needed to go to the bathroom and he stopped, she told the court. In the bathroom she rang her friends and the next thing she remembered was hearing her phone ring and being back in the bed with Putland on top of her again.

The court heard that the woman’s friends arrived at the address and left with her in a taxi. The woman saw a forensic doctor two days after the incident but did not report it to police until November 2016, initially saying she did not want her mother to know what had happened.

The prosecuting barrister told Cardiff crown court the woman was passed on “as if she were chattel”.

Christopher Rees, for the defence, questioned her recollection of events and said she told the doctor in 2015 that she had drunk half a litre of Malibu and vodka lemonades. During cross-examination, he asked why she had not and left when Putland entered the room, to which she replied: “I froze. I am not sure … I wasn’t thinking straight. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going to happen at that time.”

Putland denied her claims and said the woman had been “very friendly and happy and flirtatious” while they were chatting after Lloyd had introduced them.

In his closing speech, Rees told jurors this was not a “court of morals”. He said: “Bad sex is not rape. Sex after one party has persuaded the other to have sex consensually is not rape. Regretted sex is not rape.”

Rees said there had been “glaring inconsistencies” in what the woman told people at various times about the night. “She had the opportunity to say no and she did not say anything,” he said. “She did not stop it. She did not call out to Ieuan Lloyd. She did not call out to anyone at all. From that you can infer that she did consent, or may have consented.”