Duncan Scott is a hard man to catch, in the pool and out. During the Tokyo Olympics the British press spent a lot of time trying, and failing, to get a word with him as he peeled off nine races in eight days. There were three rounds in the 200m freestyle, three more in the 200m medley, two in the men’s 4x100m medley relay, and another in the 4x200m freestyle relay. By the end of the week, Scott had won more medals than any British athlete at a single Games – one gold and three silver – but had barely said a word in public because he was so busy racing, sleeping, losing, winning.
It was the same at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. On the Gold Coast Scott swam 11 races in five days and won six medals. In Birmingham in 2022 it was 12 in five, and he won six more. It’s not unusual for swimmers to enter multiple races at major championships, but the job Scott takes on is something else again. His teammate Adam Peaty called him an “inspiration” in Tokyo, and it’s undeniably true there is something heartening about watching him go about his swimming. He has an abundant love of what he does, but apparently no interest in the trappings that go with it.
“Sadly it all kind of came back to haunt me at the end,” says Scott, who is working as an ambassador for Aldi, official partner of Team GB & ParalympicsGB. “When I finished my last race in Tokyo I had to do eight hours of media back‑to‑back‑to‑back, which was kind of raw.” Everyone wanted a piece of him, but by then Scott was so exhausted that he wasn’t able to say much more about his achievement than it “hadn’t really sunk in”. If anything, his feelings seemed more bitter than sweet. Those three silver medals, seemed, by his way of thinking, only to mean that he had endured three defeats.
“Looking back, after every race I was thinking: ‘I’m falling short of each thing I want to achieve.’” Even the 4x200m freestyle relay was disappointing, he says, because “we missed the world record by 0.03 seconds”. When I cheerily remind him that he still won the gold, he says: “Yeah, that’s probably the difference in our mindsets, there.” Time was, and not so long ago, when British swimmers seemed happy simply to make the Olympics. In 2012 they sent 38 swimmers to London, and won just a silver and two bronze medals between them. Scott, like Peaty, is cut from different cloth.
He reminds me of Andy Murray. Some of it simply down to his accent – Scott grew up in Alloa, 20 minutes down the road from Murray’s old hometown of Dunblane – but it’s also in his attitude. Like Murray, Scott has a same dry sense of humour that takes some getting used to and, like Murray, he is always ready to speak his mind. He refused to shake hands with Sun Yang at the world championships in 2019, in protest against the Chinese swimmer’s doping conviction. And he has also spent a lot of time in the past year publicly lobbying British politicians to provide more funding for local leisure centres, after two of his own local pools closed.
“The leisure industry took a beating because of the rising energy bills,” Scott says. “And that is a worry, especially because the pools being closed tend to be in quite deprived areas. If you’re in a low-income household it’s quite challenging to find the time and money to commute to another one.”
Learning to swim, he points out, is a skill that can save your life. But it’s more than that. “Those leisure centres are more like community hubs, they’re places where the young go to learn a new sport, the elderly go to socialise, and the injured go for rehab, you know? Worse, from what I’ve been told there’s probably more closures down the road as well.”
More than any of that, though, Scott is like Murray in that he seems, even by the standards of elite athletes, to have an almost boundless appetite for doing the hard yards, and the fact they make competing look like such suffering.
Turns out Scott used to be a tennis player himself, and even trained on the courts alongside Murray at the University of Stirling as a junior. “I wasn’t great to be honest,” he says. “I was just someone that was keen to turn up, get beaten six-love and go home. But it’s a sport I love. I used to watch Andy train at Stirling, and I’ve loved watching him compete against arguably the best players ever in Djokovic, Federer, and Nadal. And I still love the fact that he still plays even when people keep asking him why he doesn’t quit, just because he loves it so much.”
Seems Scott feels similarly. You need to, to be a swimmer. It is a thankless sport, all long days and endless lengths. He started doing it competitively when he was seven, his mum sent him along for trials at the local pool. He met his coach, Steven Tigg, at that session, and they’re still together now.
Tigg was only a young volunteer coach himself at the time, and the two of them have come up together. Scott gives Tigg a lot of credit for turning him into the athlete he is now. “He believed in me way more, way earlier than I did myself. And I’m hugely grateful for that. It’s only over the last few years that I’ve been truly aware of what I’m able to achieve.”
Tigg thinks Scott’s tennis background is one of the reasons he is able to plough through the races, because he grew up playing a sport that forced him to always think about the next point instead of the one just gone. “I certainly think the schedule is more gruelling mentally than it is physically,” Scott says.
It still took him time to come to terms with what happened in Tokyo, where he was a fingernail’s width away from winning gold in the 200m free and the 200m medley. “On reflection, I’m incredibly proud of it. It’s probably the best that I’ve competed on back-to-back days. I swam the best that I ever have in the final, every single time, and there’s not much more that you can do than that.”
It will be similar in Paris, where the competition will, he says, be “stacked” again. Scott is planning to compete in the 200m free and the 200m medley, as well as the relays. He has to qualify first, at the British championships which begin on Tuesday, where he will be up against his friend Tom Dean again.
Beyond that, in Paris he will be racing Yang and Leon Marchand, the Frenchman who beat Michael Phelps’s world record in the 400m individual medley. “He’s probably the face of French swimming, if not of world swimming, at the minute,” Scott says. “He’s phenomenal to watch, and a really nice kid, hopefully I’ll be able to get myself into a nice head-to-head with him.”
I tell him I look forward to being there to watch him put himself through it all over again. “Yeah,” he says with a laugh, “I look forward to not speaking to you again.”
