At the very end there were just two-hundredths of a second between Adam Peaty and the third gold medal he has been chasing these last 14 months, which is nothing at all, but more than enough. The margin was so small that when he touched the wall he thought he had won. And he actually had beaten the swimmer he thought he was racing against, his great Chinese rival Qin Haiyang, who was in the lane next to him. The problem was that once he had, while 25m out, he found himself all of a sudden in another contest against the USA’s Nic Fink and Italy’s Nicolò Martinenghi, who was way off to one side in lane seven.
Martinenghi beat him. Just. It was the first time anyone had in a solo Olympic competition, and Peaty took it with good grace. As soon as the results were up on the big screen, he made his way over to lane seven and wrapped Martinenghi up in a hug. “Enjoy it,” he told him. Peaty knows just how important it is to make the most of the good times in this sport.
It was a result no one saw coming when the swimmers stepped out on to the pool deck. Some waved when they arrived, some of them punched the air, pressed their hands together in prayer, or cupped their hands to their ears.
Peaty, 29, did not so much as flicker his eyes left or right. The defending champion walked straight ahead to the blocks, and set himself for the race ahead.
Win it, as he did in Rio and Tokyo, and he would become the third swimmer in history, after Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky, to win gold in the same event at three consecutive Olympic Games.
It turned out that behind his inscrutability, there was a small and unfamiliar doubt. He had woken with a sore throat that morning, though he refused to make an excuse of it, and he knew, underneath, that after what he’s been through in recent years, when he’s struggled with drink and depression, and gone through what his mother, Caroline, described as a lot of “suffering”, he didn’t have enough of the old stuff in him any more.
Peaty’s time of 59.05sec was well down on what he was once capable of, and did not even rank among the top 50 of his career. He was even a lot quicker at the British trials in April, and if he could have only matched what he had done then, he would have won comfortably.
He mentioned it himself afterwards, while he was still trying to figure out exactly what he felt about it all. He held back tears as he spoke about how hard it had been to even make it to the start line here, and said he was sure that he couldn’t have done any more.
Still, he looked pretty rueful as he walked off the podium with that silver medal around his neck. At least he did until he met his little kid, George, and wrapped him up in a hug.
The truth is that living the way he did back when he was winning everything took a hell of a lot out of Peaty, and led, in large part, to the breakdown he went through after the Tokyo Olympics.
If Peaty’s mum gets her way, the two relays he has ahead of him this week will be the last time he competes. She said she wants him to finish swimming and “have some kind of normality”. And if his silver here came in exchange for a little peace of mind after everything he’s been through in the last decade, then maybe the gold was worth foregoing.
Because swimming can be a thankless sport. Just ask Max Litchfield, who went in the 400m individual medley an hour before Peaty stepped on to the deck.
Litchfield is 30. This was the Briton’s third Olympics, his third final, and his third fourth-place finish. In 2016 he was a second and a half off bronze, in 2020, it was two tenths, and in 2024 it was two tenths again, just a little less time than it takes to blink an eye.
Litchfield, like Peaty, has suffered a lot along the way. He came through a personal crisis which he has always refused to talk about, but which forced him to skip a world championships, which meant, in turn, that he had his funding cut. But like Peaty, he fought his way back here and made it all the way to the final again, only to come fourth again. All of a sudden Peaty’s silver doesn’t look so bad.
Like everyone else in his race, Litchfield was only ever fighting for second place behind the French phenomenon Léon Marchand, who was so far in front that his only competition was the world record he set last year. He didn’t catch it, quite, but his time of 4min 2.5sec easily beat the Olympic record set by Michael Phelps in 2008. It was the sort of dominant performance Peaty used to make a habit of, back when he was a little more successful, and a whole lot less happy.
