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.”
