“I think the 50m sprint is a great opportunity for me,” Adam Peaty says with a glint in his steely gaze as he reveals that, after winning two golds and a silver medal in the 100m breaststroke at three successive Olympic Games, he is ready to keep swimming until 2028. After a bid from World Aquatics, the sport’s governing body, to persuade the IOC to include more sprint events at the Los Angeles Olympics, the greatest breaststroke swimmer in history could resist retirement.
“If the 50 metre is part of that I will 100% dedicate myself to getting there,” Peaty continues. “If the 50 metre isn’t part of that then it’s a big question mark. It’s a 50-50 decision.”
Peaty, who will turn 30 in December, looks intently at me as he pauses. “You’ve documented my journey for a very long time, almost 10 years, and I remember our first interview in 2015 in Salford. I’ve changed so much since then and I’ve also got so much more responsibility now. It’s no longer a question of: ‘Do I want to do it?’ It’s whether my family wants me to do it, like [his fiancee] Holly, [his son] George and hopefully other kids we have. It’s no longer a selfish decision and we have to take that into consideration as it is incredibly hard.”
But the lure of the 50m sprint is addictive for Peaty. “I’m a very powerful sprinter. I can do that all day long,” he says with the old relish which drove him to such heights in the 100m discipline. Peaty was unbeaten in that event for eight years and his shock defeat at the 2022 Commonwealth Games culminated in a distressing mental breakdown which made him think he might never swim again. But Peaty, with his characteristic grit allied to a newfound equanimity, found a way back.
This summer, at the Paris Olympics, he won silver in the 100m breaststroke. He swam with Covid, which was confirmed the next morning, and lost his third consecutive gold medal by just two-hundredths of a second. Peaty cried when interviewed after the race but his changed philosophy shone through. “I am not crying because I have come second,” Peaty said. “I am crying because of how much it took to get here. In my heart I have won. These are happy tears.”
But it seemed as if Peaty could have swum his last race in the 4x100m medley. He and the British relay team just missed a medal in a race won by China. The result left a bitter taste for Peaty because Qin Haiyang and Sun Jiajun, two of the victorious quartet, had previously tested positive for traces of banned performance-enhancing drugs. Neither were sanctioned as the results were accepted as food contamination.
Peaty said that he “might have to step away from the sport” because “it hurts too much”.
Back home, on a quiet October morning, a new energy courses through him when I ask if he might even race in both the 50m and the 100m breaststroke in 2028. “I could, yeah,” he says with a sparky grin. “I’m a happy-go-lucky guy but that decision relies 100% on the 50m. If the 50m sprints for breaststroke, fly and backstroke, for both genders, are included I think they’ll compromise by maybe taking out some of the distance events.”
Peaty has already considered how he might prepare for a return to competition. He is engaged to Holly, the daughter of Gordon Ramsay, and his son was born four years ago when he was in a relationship with Eirianedd Munro. His life is now not really suited to the kind of grinding commitment that meant he swam between 10,000m to 12,000m in training every day.
Would he train differently for the 50m? “The 100 requires a lot more training and aerobic fitness. That is more punishing. But it’s not impossible to do both. If I know there’s a 50m in 2028, that’s one I’m going to target. But I will also train for the 100 and see what we do there. For the 100 I would need to swim at least 9,000m a day. But if I just went for the 50m, I could drop my training to 5,000m or potentially even 4,000m a day.”
After all our talk of future possibilities it feels right to return to his tumultuous summer. Peaty once said that “second, for me, is losing.” Does he still feel as positive and philosophical about winning silver in Paris? “Absolutely. As time passes, more wisdom comes. I did everything I could with the cards I was dealt. But of course you have moments of: ‘What if I did this or that? ‘You’re a little disappointed because it’s 0.02 of a second [between silver and gold].”
Peaty laughs. “It’s fucking ridiculous. But I couldn’t have delivered a better result with what I had. You can’t do much when your body is fighting illness. I really suffered because of that. But when I got my medal it was for Holly and George and I was like: ‘There’s nothing that could have replaced this feeling, ever.’ Forget all the medals and world records. That doesn’t define me. Being a father defines me. Being a husband, hopefully next year, defines me. Being a good person and having good relationships with people defines me.”
He is keen to mentor young swimmers and people from underprivileged backgrounds and it is typical of Peaty’s enhanced empathy that he should express his happiness for Nicolò Martinenghi, the new Olympic champion whom he had beaten countless times before. “I’ve raced Nicolò for a very long time and he’s a great guy, and great for the sport. Out of all the others in the field I wanted him to win it. So it was great to share the joy with him.”
The race was won in a slow time – 59.03 compared to Peaty’s world record 56.88. Peaty also swam quicker in the semi-final and at the British trials. “I’ve been faster a huge amount of times, even when I haven’t been rested. I don’t want to say it was a slow pool, because there was a lot of fast swimming. But that was such a slow time for me because of the circumstances that I was in. Normally I could do 50m easily underwater to warm up my lungs. Because I had Covid, which I didn’t know at the time, I got to 15m on the morning of the final, and I was like: ‘I can’t breathe.’ I was down to about 30% of what I am normally capable of. So once you put it in that context then you say: ‘Wow, actually I’m very blessed to have done what I did.’ I’m a man of my faith that God has put me in this place for a reason. A silver medal may change my thinking and the rest of my life in a better way.”
Did his heart sink when he woke up feeling poorly on the morning of the final? “No. I’ve been trained by Mel Marshall and worked with some incredible people like [the sports psychiatrist] Steve Peters. So it was like: ‘Oh, OK. I’ve got a headache, a bit of a fever and sore throat’. But in my mind I was soon saying: ‘I don’t care, let’s just go.’ Me and Mel would always say: ‘Get over the trench and just charge.’ It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a broken ankle or a sore throat. I could have easily gone: ‘I’m going to pull out because I’m ill.’ But how would that define me for the rest of my life? I was like: ‘No, we’re going to give our absolute best here.’”
When Peaty returns to the pool he will initially have to train without the guidance of Marshall. She is an outstanding coach who has been with him since he was a teenager. But, having said that sport in the UK left her and other coaches, especially women, feeling disempowered, Marshall has moved to Australia to start a new job. Did she talk to Peaty, with whom she remains so close, about that disempowerment?
“Yes, she did. From my perspective she is an incredible coach that has been undervalued, under-supported and sometimes even [stopped from making] decisions which would have made her an even better coach. But like any high-performance job, you have people who will try and bring you down. People reading this will know who they are.
“But that’s just sport in this country. It will not change until someone goes: ‘This is not good enough.’ Mel has taken the decision to go to Australia because she’s finding that value from them. Why would you work somewhere where you didn’t feel valued? It’s ridiculous.”
Peaty also questions the undercurrent of doping which swirls around elite swimming. When asked what he thought of the fact that 11 swimmers were allowed to compete in Paris after previously testing positive for PEDs he says: “It’s absolutely ridiculous. I think we would all say that you want people competing fairly and with honour. I don’t think Wada [the World Anti-Doping Authority] have been stern enough and hard enough. That has to change.
“The ITA, the international testing agency, has a formula going forward where only one governing body around the world controls the testing procedure with no bias. That’s going to be the challenge for sport now. How can we shift to this system? I have absolutely no quarrels with having all my testing results online for anyone to view from any country. Why isn’t that something that’s implemented? We need 100% transparency because testing should not be hidden. For me, it was the lack of transparency and most of it was very suspicious and only came out three years later after a leak reported by journalists.”
In April a New York Times investigation reported that 23 Chinese swimmers at the Tokyo Olympics had tested positive for trimetazidine, a banned substance, at a training camp just months before those Games began. The swimmers were cleared to compete because Wada determined it was “not in a position to disprove the possibility that contamination was the source” after a Chinese anti-doping investigation attributed the contamination to a hotel kitchen. An outcry following the NYT article prompted Wada to commission an independent prosecutor which supported their handling of the case. Peaty, though, stresses that “we need a system that gives fans 100% trust [in the testing procedure and the swimmers].”
Peaty is an ambassador for Castore , the sportswear brand he has worked with for many years, and he has been too busy to feel the post-Olympic blues. But does he miss the strict routine of training while talking about so many wider issues?
“Yes and no. Sometimes I’m like: ‘Wow, I wish I was just swimming now as it’s my safe zone.’ But I wouldn’t be learning and growing if I didn’t put myself into these uncomfortable situations that are very important for me to be the person I want to be for the rest of my life.”
But, as Peaty is so driven to race, he could soon be ready to start the next Olympic cycle. “Yeah,” he says with a determined smile. “It’s like people climb Everest every season, and not everyone, including some of the best climbers in the world, will make it. The climbing mentality is that losing is still an experience. Sometimes it’s even more important than making the summit because it really pushes you to find out who you are. It’s the same with sport – and with me.”