Being a spectator at Wimbledon left Adam Peaty contemplating how much he has left in the tank and how many more years he can continue at the top of the sport.
Taking a place in the Royal Box at the end of the opening week, he was more in awe of an absentee than the players in action on Centre Court.
“I’m inspired by all the top players but Roger Federer is the one where I think he’s just class, isn’t he?” said Peaty. “The way he comes across, how he performs, his attitude in the sport, that’s someone you want to look up to, you get to your late 30s or early 40s still doing your sport then why not.”
It begs the question whether Peaty can be the Federer of swimming. He has achieved similar periods of dominance but can he match the Swiss for longevity?
He said: “That’s another 10 years or more and it’s a brutal sport especially as you get older but you find new ways don’t you.”
There are partial parallels between Federer and Peaty, the notable absentees from their respective big events of the summer, in the Englishman’s case the World Aquatics Championships.
He suffered a fractured foot when a lunge in the gym while at a training camp went wrong. He heard a crack and an MRI scan uncovered the injury, which needed six to 12 weeks to recover.
His return comes at the Commonwealth Games, where he last experienced defeat in an individual breaststroke — in Gold Coast in 2018. Suffering shoulder problems and a lack of motivation, it acted as the springboard to all the success that followed.
The foot injury has been the one setback amid it all, unless you consider an exit from Strictly Come Dancing, which was far more premature than he had hoped for.
“It [the Commonwealth Games] wasn’t a great championships for me,” said Peaty. “My focus was a bit somewhere else. It was not me. But I learned so much from that experience and came back a few weeks later at the Europeans and broke the world record.
“You have those parts of your career but it’s the resilience and fightback that really counts. If someone annoys me or a scenario annoys me, it creates a fire and you work at an unbelievable rate to fix it. I knew I wasn’t that athlete and I was going to prove to the world I was this athlete.
“I’ve had to go through the real rubbish times where I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t do anything and seeing everyone else progress. If you store that in a bottle and use it when you need, no one else can come near you when you’ve got that drive.”
When this injury — the first serious one of his career at the age of 27 — struck, his coach Mel Marshall asked if he would rather have a few weeks off than turn to other forms of training.
On reflection, he realises it was “advanced psychology” on her part. “She knew the answer but she did it to plant the seed so it was my choice and that way I was going to work harder,” said Peaty.
The rehabilitation has gone better than hoped, his training up to speed, the only question mark about his race pace. He has two races to his name this season, as opposed to a usual 20 at this time in the calendar.
It means his usual world record swims might prove a stroke too far in Birmingham but in some ways the injury has helped with motivation.
There was not the same comedown from the Tokyo Olympics he suffered in the wake of the last Games, in Rio, but he admits he was burnt out by the time he took to the blocks in Japan.
“I took a few months off and did a bit of dancing and this injury has given me a rest period and the chance for a fightback,” he said. During his rehab, he asked himself, ‘Can I keep going high to high, can I keep doing these championships?’
“I don’t see why it will be stopped. Of course, some days will be hard, you’ll wake up and go ‘bloody hell, I’m sore, I can’t open my eyes, I’m really tired’. But I find joy in that because you put your body in that hole. For me, that’s negative energy and those thoughts don’t really belong in my brain.
I like and thrive on pressure, as sport should be like that
“I like it and thrive on that pressure, as sport should be like that.”
Adam Peaty is an ambassador of British sportswear brand Castore, wearing Castore’s SS22 collection on his journey to the Commonwealth Games this month. Available to purchase at castore.com
