‘My family are embracing all the attention they get’
Adam Peaty’s profile has soared over past year but he is hungry for more glory, he tells Jim White
This time last year, when the breaststroke swimmer Adam Peaty was preparing for the Olympic Games, he was barely recognised beyond the boundaries of his own kitchen. A year on, the first Briton to win a gold medal in Rio and the man who, in the process, destroyed the existing world 100metre record, is gathering a sizeable crowd in Trafalgar Square.
Mind you, anyone standing by one of the square’s lions dressed only in a pair of micro swimming trunks, flanked by a couple of male models wearing not much more than a coating of gold paint, is likely to stop the traffic. Especially when, like Peaty, they have a body to make Superman jealous. This is a man whose muscles appear to have muscles. “I enjoy being creative – it’s a change of pace, something different,” he says of his stint modelling a new Arena swimwear collection to which he has put his name. “So, when they asked me to get involved in a new range, I thought ‘why not?’ It’s good to get a different fan club from a different walk of life.”
The fans have been accumulating ever since the 22-year-old from Uttoxeter went on his record-smashing stint in Rio. His recent appearance on the cover of Attitude magazine was apparently responsible for the biggest social-media share in the publication’s history. And it is not just him. His granny had a brief moment of fame last summer after she tweeted footage of her enthusiastic celebrations as her grandson ploughed his way through the Rio pool to victory. Her reward was to be presented with a gold-painted shopping trolley by her local supermarket.
“She loves it. Absolutely loves it,” he says of his granny’s brush with celebrity (and yes, she still uses the trolley). “Being the first medallist in Rio brought a lot of attention on my family but they have embraced it. It’s nice to get stopped in the street, not just in Uttoxeter but here in London. It’s humbling when you get kids lining up to meet you – we did one event just after the Olympics, and it was four or five hours to get through everyone. It was manic.”
The next stage of Peaty’s one-man campaign to proselytise his sport comes this weekend when he competes at the World Aquatics Championships in Budapest. In Rio, he twice broke the world record for 100m, bringing it down to 57.13seconds as he tore to glory in the final. As a measure of his achievement, as recently as 2001 the record stood at over a minute. But he is not satisfied with what he has achieved thus far. Not remotely. “The target is to go under 56sec for the 100m, and we’ve called it Project 56,” he says. “That’s completely possible, although I’m not fussed whether I manage to do it in Budapest. As long as I’ve done it by around 2020, I’ll be happy enough.” In many ways, Peaty has redefined the art of breaststroke swimming. His powerful physique and long arms deliver an extraordinarily high stroke rate: in the Olympic final, he put in three strokes more per length than those who came in second and third. It means he is the subject of intense scrutiny. “When I was training in the US, there were underwater cameras filming me,” he says. “Some people call it spying but I have no problem with that. Everywhere we go now, there are people trying to adopt my technique. As far as I’m concerned, copies are never as good as the original. They can copy me, but can’t replicate what I do in the pool.”
And what he does in the
‘I think swimming should be more like boxing – with an element of rivalry people will enjoy’
Loughborough pool where he trains, is endless hard work, under the supervision of his coach, the former British freestyle record holder Mel Marshall. “She can be a hard taskmaster, but she’s also good at stepping back to take a view on the situation,” he says of Marshall. “She’s been there and done it, so she knows exactly what I’m going through. When you are churning out 10-11,000 metres a day in the pool, she knows there are going to be days when you are down, and it’s how a coach picks you up and gets the best out of you on those days which is so important. I wouldn’t be sitting here as an Olympic champion without her input, that’s for sure.”
Multiple sessions in the pool, hours in the gym, consuming 5,000 calories a day: as it was for Rio, it has been an arduous build-up to Budapest. And when Peaty gets on the start line this weekend, he will ensure his rivals are aware of the work he has put in.
“I pace up and down in front of people. I don’t know if that psyches them out or not,” he says. “But I think it should be more like boxing – not necessarily trash talking, but an element of rivalry that makes people look forward to watching.”
And he jiggles his astonishingly honed pectoral muscles with a sly grin. No wonder he has brought Trafalgar Square to a standstill.