Adam Peaty says he has reset his priorities as an athlete following the mental health issues that caused him to take a break from swimming, but has warned his Olympic rivals that “it’s always about the three-peat” as he begins to count down to Paris.
This year, the 100m breaststroke world-record holder revealed he had been “on a self-destructive spiral” that had led him to question his love for the sport. But Peaty says he is now “a lot happier” having adapted his approach beyond a mentality that focussed only on increasing the success he could deliver in the pool.
“I do it for more reasons now,” Peaty said. “I do it for the memories, I do it for the family and pride. I do it for way more than just turning up and swimming a race, really. It’s not like I’m on a retreat and just doing it for the love of it. It’s always about the medals. It’s always about the three-peat. But while the medal is the material you get at the end of it, the journey you go on is the thing you’ll remember.”
Peaty says he had become too focussed on continual improvement, on making the small changes that could help him shave even more time off a world record he has already broken on 20 occasions.
“I think it’s why I got a little caught up with myself,” he told the Guardian at an event in his role as an ambassador for Bridgestone. “I was trying to look at too many things when really the most important thing is training and the racing and making sure you do them both to the best of your ability. I over-estimated how much I really need to do. You just need to keep it simple. Do what you love, do it to the best of your ability every single day, follow the process, and hopefully the results will come.
“If something you love becomes something you hate, stop, because it will just spiral and spiral. I was always one of those people who was like ‘no crack on, crack on’ and our culture used to be like that a little bit. But we look at the human cost of that and it’s huge.
“For me I was getting the gold but at what cost? Relationships end, your friends and family are on the back burner, even your own children have to be on the back burner. Everything you can ever imagine, your social life, things you enjoy are on the back burner. The counter argument to that is: you choose to do this. I did, but at the same time you’ve got to put number one first and I don’t see any problem with that.”
Peaty said he had come to an accommodation with his own desires for improvement and the need to retain perspective.
“It’s about getting the conversation right,” he said, “that we have to show resilience, we have to show perseverance. At the same time it’s OK to sometimes feel like you’re down. For me, I don’t use that as an excuse for my performance, though it’s really hard to detach. It’s really hard to separate the athlete from the human but you’ve got to put the human first.”
With 14 months to go until the Paris Olympics, Peaty said he was in a stage in in his preparation where “the psychological load is quite low” and he was able to think about his aspirations, in the pool and beyond, before fully returning to training in September. As for achieving gold at three consecutive Olympics, a feat managed only four times before in the pool and only once by a man, Michael Phelps, Peaty remained sanguine.
The reason the “three-peat” remains such a rare achievement, he said, is that it takes “a very long time” to achieve. “There’s no reason why [it can’t be done] but I think a lot of people either retire or they get burned out but keep going for no reason and they don’t get the result that they want.
“So I identified that and I said to myself I’m not going to let myself burn out for no reason and I’m going to take a raincheck and just have a bit of a break, and hopefully that will give me a second wind into the second half of my career.”
