Double Olympic gold. Strictly. Broken foot. Broken heart. ADHD. Shock defeat. Heavy drinking. Depression. Finding God. Finding love. Finding purpose. Comeback.
“It’s been a whirlwind,” says Adam Peaty, reflecting with some understatement on the past three years. And, should all go to plan over the coming month, the final two words on that list will simply be: Olympic immortality.
Only one man has won any Olympic swimming event three times in a row – the American Michael Phelps – and, after wanting to quit the sport last year, Peaty could simultaneously match that feat and win Britain’s first gold medal of the Paris Games.
“I’d crashed and burned, didn’t want to do any of it – the sport had broken me,” says Peaty of his decision, one tearful morning in February 2023, to walk away. And now?
“I came to the realisation that the pain of regret is a lot harder to deal with than the pain of losing. I think, truly, I’m on this journey and I’m guided by something that is bigger than me. I’ve got a gift and I don’t want to waste that.”
Since being poolside for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, I have sat down to speak with Peaty at least once or twice a year and, while Britain’s greatest swimmer always brings a fascinating zeal to any conversation, the nature of that energy has shifted noticeably.
Words like ‘warrior’, ‘conquer’ and ‘domination’ no longer pepper his sentences, and he seems less restless and more relaxed.
He even looks younger. Gone are the dalliances with a shaven head or moustache, and he is back to the more fresh-faced appearance of when he first burst on to the scene a decade ago. Peaty nods when I suggest that his life since the last Olympics could be separated into four quite distinct phases.
“I think that’s fair,” he says. There was the afterglow of Tokyo itself, when Peaty was the talisman of Team GB’s most successful Olympic swimming squad ever and in high demand away from the pool.
He took part in Strictly Come Dancing (describing it as a “once- in-a-lifetime opportunity”, he finished in ninth place). He wrote a book about high performance called The Gladiator Mindset and made a very conscious decision not to resume serious training until the following January.
“I was battered,” says Peaty, after a five-year Olympic cycle that included the Covid-19 lockdowns and long training sessions alone inside a giant Jacuzzi in his garden in Loughborough, with a rope attached to his trunks.
Phase two was a return to swimming in preparation for a home Commonwealth Games in 2022, which was wrecked by a freak accident while doing a side lunge in a Tenerife gym. Peaty broke a metatarsal bone in his foot and was forced to wear a protective boot for six weeks; a period during which he first spoke publicly about potentially having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
“They say that people with ADHD have a drive. It’s like a hyper-focus,” he told me in 2022. “I don’t know where it has come from but I can’t sit still… It’s very interesting how sport has helped me to channel that [energy]. I’ve always known there was something different about me in the last 15 metres in a race.”
A formal ADHD diagnosis would follow. He then rushed his competitive return and was beaten in a 100 metre breaststroke race for the first time in eight years. Defeat left him training furiously and “breathing fire”, but he would discover that no furnace can rage indefinitely.
“If anything is emotionally led, you are going to run out of steam, no matter how good your purpose is,” he says.
Peaty would also separate later that summer from Eiri Munro, the mother of his now three-year-old son George-Anderson, before a downward spiral that culminated 17 months ago when he found himself swimming up and down the university pool in Loughborough, his goggles filled with tears. Still crying in the shower afterwards, Peaty told his long-time coach and mentor Mel Marshall he was “done”. He drove to a shop and bought himself a huge stash of chocolate. He had also turned to alcohol.
“I didn’t care about swimming any more and I would be happily walking away,” he says now, looking across the very same Loughborough pool, in which he regularly swims 40 miles (the equivalent of 2,560 lengths of a regular pool) a week.
‘We have to literally batter ourselves every day’
“My validation of what I get out of sport, which was the result, just wasn’t worth doing. We have to literally batter ourselves every day. In life, we have these many moments of: are you willing to do what you need to do, to do what you want to do? That comes down to a contract with yourself, and I wasn’t willing to sign the contract any more.”
Although Peaty was unsure at this point whether he would return for a third Olympics, he also did not tear up that contract completely. It was just placed in a drawer, ready to be potentially redrafted, while he took time to understand what he really wanted.
There were two other seismic changes in his life. In February 2023, Peaty started going to church regularly. His weekly routine now includes being part of a new community completely removed from sport. It began when another swimmer, Kyle Chalmers, introduced him to the Olympic chaplain and academic Dr Ashley Null. They duly attended a service and Peaty instantly felt as though he had discovered something that was missing.
Null specifically encouraged Peaty to see sport as a vehicle for self-discovery rather than a results-based validation of his worth and identity. “I’ve come to full confidence in who I am, wearing my skin, and being true and authentically myself,” he says. “Church has helped me get to that state. When I look at myself in the mirror, I’m very peaceful.”
Last summer, Peaty also began dating Holly Ramsay, the 24-year-old daughter of the celebrity chef Gordon. Holly’s sister, Tilly, had competed in the same series of Strictly as Peaty.
Peaty says that getting to know Gordon, whom he calls “a high-level… great person”, has helped, too: “He just inspires me to be successful. Holly is obviously part of the core team every single day. She is on this journey with me.”
He insists that he likes a “quiet life”, and that being commented upon on social media after occasionally making it into the front end of a newspaper – such as when they all went to the British Grand Prix at Silverstone together last July – is far removed from his “simple” day-to-day priorities.
“Social media has a tendency to have a snapshot of people’s lives that may not be true,” he says. “With Silverstone, I was training my a— off and it was the one day a week that I have off. I really don’t care what anyone else thinks on social media.”
The relationship with Holly has evidently been going from strength to strength. Peaty talks openly about the importance of being a “better father, better boyfriend, partner, hopefully husband one day”, and he has had the letter H tattooed just below his neck.
Holly’s Instagram has become a catalogue of domestic bliss, including a clip in May of them mowing the lawn simultaneously, with the caption : “Weekends at home.”
The pictures also include Holly presenting the men’s 100m breaststroke medals at the GB Swimming Championships in April, where Peaty again sent reverberations around the aquatics world by producing his first swim under 58 seconds since Tokyo. “You never fail to amaze me,” wrote Holly. “Your determination, physical and mental strength is inspiring to all.”
Peaty stresses that there was not just one moment that brought him back to competitive swimming, but a whole series of “baby steps” between February and the start of last July. There was also the looming reality that an already uphill Olympic task would be rendered impossible if he waited much longer.
“So many things helped me get to the point, whether it was a bible verse that someone sent me, or a quote from Mike Tyson or someone else,” he says. “Resting gave me the ability to see that whole picture. When you are so exhausted, you can only see tunnel vision. You don’t quit, you rest.
‘Guarantees are boring. I’m not an accountant’
“I was still going in the water, to keep the feel, but it wasn’t until June, July [of 2023] that I thought, OK, I’ve really got to shift. What’s the worst that can happen? A year of my life is not really that much. I think I can find the love back for it. Which I have.
“I could have called it [retired] back in 2022 or 2023 and been this athlete who has done what I’ve done… or I could put it all on the table. I get really excited when I take risks. I get really excited when I’m challenged. And I think to go into these Olympic Games, trying to find the path to peak performance, was the ultimate challenge. I still don’t know if I’m going to find it. But that’s the joy of it. Guarantees are boring. I’m not an accountant. I’m a highly energetic athlete who is wanting to risk the ultimate in our sport, which is Olympic gold.”
It is striking to hear Peaty openly countenance the possibility of sporting defeat in a way that would once have sounded utterly alien. Our previous interviews were always full of wonderfully headline-making alpha-male quotes, from comparing himself to Alexander the Great to describing “the beast” inside and how it was all just a question of deciding when to unleash this indomitable creature through the water. This happened most spectacularly when he set what many good judges still regard as the best world record in swimming history by going under 57 seconds in the 100m breaststroke at the 2019 World Aquatics Championships. In a sport usually decided by fractions, no other person at that time had gone below 58 seconds.
“I had a whisper in his ear: ‘Your night is tonight. Go and f—— get it.’ His eyeballs were red and he was gone,” recalls Mel Marshall.
Much of that ferocious passion seemed to stem from Peaty’s upbringing. He shared a bedroom with two brothers and a family friend at home in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, and grew up initially terrified of water after his brothers told him that sharks could swim up through the plughole of their bath. His parents, Mark and Caroline, a bricklayer and the manager of a nursery respectively, only made it to Rio de Janeiro in 2016 to see their son’s first Olympic gold when a chance conversation with the call-out engineer for their broken washing machine resulted in Whirlpool funding the trip.
Peaty, though, seems slightly sheepish when I remind him of some of this past rhetoric. The latest big tattoo, after all, is not more lions or Greek gods, but a cross on his abdomen above the words ‘Into the Light’.
‘I try to stay away from nihilism now’
“That mindset did the job for what I needed to do, the challenges I needed to face,” he says. “I try to stay away from nihilism now I guess. I do like the purpose every single day of being the best. I think the skills I’m learning now, learning about my own brain, and my own life, are so important for the future. I always want to chase borders, chase exploration, chase numbers. It’s a journey of human excellence of self.”
Peaty has also been working this past year with the renowned psychiatrist Steve Peters, and no one will ever have a more profound impact on his career than Marshall. She first spotted him as a 14-year-old at the City of Derby Swimming Club. “I thought, bloody hell, who is that? He looked like a JCB eating up the water,” she says.
Marshall would sponsor Peaty towards the cost of his first car – a Renault Clio – and talks with as much enthusiasm about their shared charity trips to Zambia as about being poolside for the three Olympic, eight world, 17 European and four Commonwealth titles.
“Mel is a constant – I think she will be until one of us stops breathing,” says Peaty. “Mel knows I will always do the job, and she knows that she has to look after the person inside the athlete. Steve [Peters] is a very unique character – very logical, very simple in the sense of, this is why you are doing this, this is why your brain reacts, and this is how you get the best of it. He is brutally honest. Other people make your life easier and harder where it needs to be. It’s having people that allow you to be in that flow state.”
Peaty was so far ahead of the opposition in Tokyo that the only question mark over the 100m breaststroke final was whether he would again lower his world record. It will be very different in Paris, partly because of his unconventional build-up but largely because of the emergence of the most serious challenger since he began dominating the event. China’s Qin Haiyang won the 50m, 100m and 200m breaststroke at the World Aquatics Championships last July, then beat Peaty early in his comeback at the World Cup races in October.
At just 25, Qin has age on his side, although his best 100m breaststroke time of 57.69 seconds remains almost a second off Peaty’s 56.88-second world record and well outside what the Englishman managed in winning his two individual Olympic titles. Indeed, Peaty still holds the top 14 times in his event’s history.
The best Peaty, then, almost certainly still wins, so the question is essentially whether, at the age of 29, he can get somewhere close to where he was.
When I bring up Qin’s name, and dare to venture that he has “won a lot in your absence”, Peaty suddenly looks unimpressed.
“Has he? He won all three [World Aquatics Championships events], which is incredible, [but] he hasn’t won a lot. He’s only done it one year in a row. The pressure is on him going into the Olympic Games. Is there a new kid on the block? Of course. I knew someone would come along if I wasn’t there. I couldn’t be there physically and mentally and I’ve enjoyed watching someone get that [the 100m title]… in a respectable time.
“I’m on the front foot, like I was in Rio, on the full attack but present, calm and relaxed, which is when Mel would say I’m most dangerous. I like being the underdog. I’ve enjoyed being the person with the bow and arrow and not the one being fired at.”
A major additional issue hanging over the Olympic swimming events is the news, which broke in April, that a group of 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for trace amounts of the banned substance trimetazidine seven months prior to the Tokyo Games.
Trimetazidine is a heart drug that can increase blood flow and improve performance. Their test results were not previously publicly disclosed, and the athletes were not sanctioned after China’s anti-doping authority attributed the findings to contamination. This explanation was accepted by the World Anti-Doping Agency following a review but the revelations have caused serious disquiet within both the sport and the wider anti-doping community.
Peaty highlights what he calls “the lack of trust and the lack of transparency”. He is also concerned that there are potentially different anti-doping practices according to where you live in the world. Peaty was recently woken at 6am on three consecutive Sunday mornings “on my only day off with a kid that needs to sleep” for random tests.
“You get that and think, what’s happening across the world? Are they getting the same treatment? It is all about fair play and strict liability.
“Hopefully it [the world anti-doping system] comes to the right decisions. If they come to the wrong decisions, there are a lot of athletes who will lose trust in the system, which is very dangerous. Right now, my focus is obviously on my own performance. I can’t control noise. I have got to do my own thing, have my own platform, and deal with all that rubbish later.”
Another burning Olympic issue is a growing sense that an event that generates billions in broadcast and sponsorship deals can no longer justify the lack of prize money for the athletes. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) brought in some $7.6 billion during the Olympic cycle that closed with Tokyo in 2021. According to media reports last year, the ‘salaries and short-term benefits’ of members of the IOC’s executive management totalled $13.95 million in 2021 and $11.65 million in 2020. World Athletics has recently taken matters into its own hands by announcing that every track and field gold medallist will receive $50,000 in prize money.
The IOC says it already redistributes more than 90 per cent of its income, but this is largely to other governing bodies, such as the National Olympic Committees and international federations, rather than directly to competing athletes. To put all this into perspective, Premier League footballers are paid wages that account for around two thirds of the revenue that their clubs earn, while basketball players in the NBA receive about half of their competition’s income.
“We are not even asking for that, we are just asking for a fair conversation around the gold medals,” says Peaty. “It should be coming from the IOC and trickling back down to the athletes, who put on the show. I think the business model that is going right now is very outdated for the athletes. We need to encourage the next generation to come through.”
Money, though, is emphatically not his driving force, and he says his higher purpose now flows directly from all the struggles.
“I think that is why this was the ultimate challenge, because it’s a victory that I’m even here and doing it in a very different way,” he says. “I will not regret one single bit if it doesn’t pay off. But I would have regretted it if I didn’t even attempt it. I want to prove to my boy, I want to prove to my future children hopefully that… there was a time when your dad was down, but he found a way around it.
“I think the ‘why?’ has changed so many times. In 2016, it was, I want to be successful, I want to be the fastest. In 2021, it was, I want to prove I can back it up. Now I’m showing that you can be at the lowest point, and still come out strong, in a healthy way, with a victory that is not defined by a medal. I wouldn’t change any of it.”
Adam Peaty drives the CUPRA Born, the brand’s first fully-electric performance-driven hatch. For more information visit www.cupraofficial.co.uk
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