PEATY THE BEAST WHO WAS BUILT FOR BREASTSTROKE MARK FOSTER’S EXCLUSIVE COLUMN
THE world was always excited about Usain Bolt — and you can see why — but Adam Peaty is more dominant than Bolt at his peak.
Percentage wise, from him to the rest of the world, it’s just something else. In an event that lasts just 56 seconds for Adam, he is a second faster than the next best. It’s such a monstrous gap.
This guy has just rewritten the record books on breaststroke. Since the Europeans in 2014 in Berlin, he has not lost a 100m breaststroke and, until recently, he had the top-20 times ever and I think he’ll get that statistic back pretty quickly, too, the way he has been going.
Historically, you have people such as Michael Phelps in the 200m butterfly who wasn’t beaten for 11 years until losing to Chad le Clos at London 2012. Okay, Phelps did a lot more events than Adam but they both changed their signature events in the pool.
In the 100m breaststroke, everyone else is swimming for second and they all know it. In fact, as bad as it sounds, the only thing that can stop Adam is Covid. While Adam chooses to swim, he just doesn’t get beaten by anyone.
You can argue he trains harder or that he does things differently but the plain difference is that physiologically his body is designed to swim breaststroke.
That description might sound stupid but breaststrokers can’t generally swim other strokes as they turn their feet out — it’s just a completely different stroke altogether.
His ankles turn out and his knees hyper-extend, and that means he’s kicking under the water in a way that’s never been done before as his body allows him to do it. He’s born for breaststroke.
It’s like Phelps, you’d look at him and think that guy’s born to swim. Adam’s the same in his discipline and there’s no way anyone in the world can copy what he’s doing — they simply physiologically can’t.
A lot of credit goes to his coach, Mel
Marshall, too. She’s incredibly modest but they have such a good relationship. The athlete-coach relationship requires a huge amount of trust and he trusts her implicitly — she does what she tells him to do, he listens and gets on with it.
What’s hard for Mel is repeating the success. We know what Adam’s capable of — if she doesn’t bring the best out of him, it comes back on her but she keeps getting it right. That doesn’t just happen even with someone as good as Adam — it requires immense homework and she clearly knows her stuff.
As for Adam, he could just get on with his swimming and look after himself but uses his name and success so well. With success comes a platform but it’s a case of whether you choose to use that platform.
I’m so impressed that he speaks out for whatever he stands for, be that doping in sport or anything else he sees as an injustice. If he thinks something is unfair, he’ll put his head above the parapet and say so. People say sport and politics don’t mix but why not? He shows it can.
He isn’t afraid to speak up for what he believes and more often he’s doing it for other people. It’s not really ever about what suits him, he’s more often discussing things that affect the sport more widely. And I respect everything he does. The guy’s incredible.