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The Popeye of the pool suddenly looked human. “I’m an older man now,” wept Adam Peaty, his once-insuperable powers now diminished. Here was a swimmer who used to be celebrated for his comic-book qualities, who at one stage held the top 20 times in the history of the 100 metres breaststroke on his own. He set a world record of 56.88 seconds at a time when nobody else had even dipped under 58. But that era of absurd dominance definitively ended here at La Defense Arena, with Peaty squeezed out of a third straight Olympic gold by an unheralded Italian he would once have crushed for fun.
Nicolo Martinenghi deserved his moment, springing a remarkable comeback over the final desperate strokes. But the winning time of 59.03 seconds was one at which prime Peaty would have scoffed. Do not forget how, in his mid-20s, he set himself the quest of “Project 56”, which suggested an ambition bordering on delusion. And yet he achieved it in 2019, breaking a 57-second barrier that had been deemed impregnable. By those standards, the task that faced him in Paris looked straightforward. With nobody in this field boasting a personal best that could compare, he surely just needed to swim without errors to prevail. The fact that he could not deliver, miscuing his start and never recovering, will cut him to the core.
It was amusing, in one sense, to hear him sound so fatalistic about his age. Peaty is just 29 years old. He is not exactly ready to be put out to pasture. But swimming is a sport that disproportionately rewards the first flush of youth. Martinighi is 24, and that five-year gap proved crucial in the final reckoning. At the Italian’s age, Peaty felt positively invincible, even talking about “Project Immortal”. But that period in which anything seems possible is all too transient. Three Olympic Games represents a lifetime in this realm, and the colossus of breaststroke has given the first inkling that he is, physically, on the wane.
Prime Peaty would have powered past his rivals in Paris
Credit: Getty Images/Quinn Rooney
To his credit, he concedes it himself. “It’s very hard to compete with the younger ones, so I’m very happy with that,” Peaty reflected. “I can’t have that relentless pursuit every single day without a sacrifice of some sort. They come in every single form.” There is no shame in that acknowledgement. Peaty has been a magnificent champion, the most prodigious force in the pool Britain has ever possessed. But there is only so long you can haul yourself up for morning training at 5am and keep staring at that black line beneath you in the water. Just ask Rebecca Adlington, who retired at 23. Peaty, having gone on for an Olympic cycle-and-a-half longer, has earned the right to dial the intensity down a notch.
It is a sobering moment, contemplating whether to give up on the only life you have ever known. The 100m breaststroke is Peaty’s cherished event, the one he conquered to such an extent that until the Tokyo Games, his only battle looked to be with himself. He had taken gold in Rio in 57.13 seconds, with what Michael Phelps hailed, in his jock vernacular, as “one of the grossest swims I’ve ever seen”. Praise from a titan such as Phelps encouraged him to believe he could achieve anything. “I definitely feel I can maintain it until Paris, and probably until Los Angeles in 2028,” he told me in 2021. “You’re only as old as you think you are, and you’re only as young as you want to be. I’ve still got a very boisterous side to me.”
Second best – for once – Peaty congratulates winner Nicolo Martinenghi and fellow silver-medal winner Nic Fink
Credit: AP/Petr David Josek
That irrepressible side has never left him. Even though he has opened up recently about his darkest hours, talking of leaning on his faith to overcome a creeping self-doubt, he has retained an effervescent spirit. To see him in your mind’s eye is to picture him performing those absurd leaping press-ups, showing such strength in his core that you could propel himself up into the air and then land back in the required position with perfect technique. He has always revelled in such freakish gifts. The knowledge that they might no longer be sufficient to keep him at the very top is difficult for this alpha athlete to accept.
But there were, true to form, no tantrums in the aftermath of this shock result. Peaty has an ego, of course, and yet he still understands how to lose gracefully. This was a result decided by the most slender of margins, with Martinenghi surging to the wall to pip a tiring Peaty by two hundredths of a second. Peaty’s body of work dwarfs that of the Italian, but he still lauded his rival for producing the swim of his life when it mattered most. It was, even with the agony of silver when he had come here only for gold, the hallmark of a champion.
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