Body + Soul 11
SAMIR HUSSEIN/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER MARC ASPLANDthing, I’d be miser-
able,” he says.
In fact, Munro is
clearly hugely
supportive, un-
complainingly
bringing up Ge-
orge as a de facto
single mother,
while Peaty
trained and com-
peted. Many
thought her loy-
alty might have
been tested after Peaty’s Argentine tango,
when he appeared almost to kiss his pro-
fessional dance partner, Katya Jones.
Social media obviously had a lot to say
about the Strictly curse (Jones, after all,
had form, having been caught in an off-
stage embrace with her celebrity partner
Seann Walsh in 2018 when both were in re-
lationships with other people). Even Mun-
ro was trolled over the steamy perform-
ance.
Peaty himself tweeted: “To everyoneThe Olympic
swimmer Adam
Peaty talks to Julia
Llewellyn Smith
about dancing,
and what’s next
T
he Olympic swimming
champion Adam Peaty has
said that when he approach-
es the pool he feels like a
god. But he didn’t feel that
way about the dancefloor
during his seven weeks of
cha-cha-cha-ing before he was kicked off
Strictly Come Dancing two weeks ago.
“Ha! The opposite!” he says. “It’s very
hard. At one point I thought, ‘This is hard-
er than winning the Olympics.’ In water I
know I’m the best in the world; dancing
I’m very, very, very, very far from the best.
But it’s been very exciting to have a differ-
ent challenge.”
Peaty returned from Tokyo with golds in
the 100m breaststroke and the mixed
4x100m relay (completed in world-record
time) and a silver in the men’s version. The
26-year-old is the first British swimmer to
retain an Olympic title and is the holder of
the 50m and 100m breaststroke world
records. He previously admitted that at
times he thought he’d rather die than lose.
Was this true of the Strictly glitterball?
“Not really. I wanted to have a laugh and
enjoy the experience,” he says, sitting on
his sofa at home in Loughborough with his
14-month-old son, George, asleep beside
him. “Sometimes I have to have those
thoughts to win again in racing. But in
Strictly I had no expectations. I knew I
would never get that opportunity again, so
I wanted to take away from it as much as I
could. I said to myself, ‘If we make it to
week three or four, we’re doing well,’ and
actually we almost doubled that.”
His mother, Caroline, a nursery nurse
(his father’s a bricklayer), was less gracious
in the defeat, tweeting that the show was
“fixed” and that she “wasn’t buying” the
public vote.
“She’s very protective of me. I had to tell
her to calm down a bit,” Peaty says equably.
After all, the Peatys are used to their son
winning everything. “Yes, exactly. But if you
win at everything you do, you’re not push-
ing yourself out of your comfort zone.”
Peaty announced he’d be taking a break
from swimming days after
Tokyo, saying
he needed to
prioritise his
mental health.
Many imagined
a month or two
watching Netflix
with his partner
and George’s
mother, Eiri
Munro. In fact,
even before the
Olympics Peaty
had already
signed up to
Strictly. “I was so over the routine I was in.
It’s a privileged way of thinking, ‘Oh no,
I’ve got to train,’ but it’s like any job. Of
course it’s going to get mundane.”
How did Munro, 23, an artist whom he
met on Tinder, feel about her partner
throwing himself from one utterly con-
suming world into another? “Eiri likes me
to be at home but I like to work, so some-
times you just have to put your foot for-
ward. If I just stayed home not doing any-who wants to see what they want, your
comments have real-life consequences.”
He says now that he was playing a part,
embracing the Latin persona. “I knew my
role, I knew what I had to do. I was playing
a character and I’m not going to do it half-
heartedly. You have to play it as much as
you can, get into it, enjoy it.” As for the hat-
ers: “I have one message for them: ‘I have
no respect for you because you’re hiding
yourself [behind another identity online].’
The whole experience [of social-media
abuse] was a learning curve. We’d not been
through this before.”
Brought up in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire,
Peaty is highly thoughtful and articulate.
When he announced his swimming break
he was rubbished by Piers Morgan, who
had also criticised Simone Biles and Em-
ma Raducanu for dropping out respective-
ly of the Olympics and Wimbledon citing
their mental health. Morgan tweeted: “I
love Peaty and he’s a great champion but
we do need some perspective about sport-
ing pressure. As an ENT [ears, nose and
throat] doctor in LA once told me during around of golf when I said he had a big pres-
sure putt: ‘Real pressure is performing
emergency tracheotomies on babies.’ ”
“I think there is a gang that guards the
old ways of sport, but if you want longevity
in your career and a performance history
remembers, you’ve got to have a break,”
says Peaty, whose book The Gladiator
Mindset was published last week. “People
say, ‘But it’s your job,’ but the working cul-
ture is changing. Some of the tech firms are
getting on that now— you can have as
many days off as you want as long as you
do your job to the best of your ability.”
With this attitude, and in many other
ways — his YouTube channel, which has
clips of him working out and in competi-
tion, his passion for grime music — Peaty
is very much a representative of his gener-
ation, and he displays a social conscience
rarely evident in sports people previously.
While peers such as the footballer Marcus
Rashford have devoted themselves to the
cause of free school meals, Peaty has spo-
ken out on athletes’ rights to protest on
Olympic podiums. He has a mixed-race
partner and son, and has also long been
campaigning to make swimming “less
white” by improving accessibility. This
year a generous donation to his Race
Clinics, where he coaches young swim-
mers around the country, allowed him to
attract a more diverse crowd. “I’ve always
been aware of it. Swimming is a majority
white-based sport: we need to do more,
we need to reach out more and provide
more facilities and more access to those
facilities to black communities. If you open
a talent pool and increase the talent
pool, we could see more Olympic gold
medallists.”
Peaty’s not perfect: both after his return
from the Rio Olympics with gold and the
2018 Commonwealth Games (where to his
horror he was beaten in the 50m), he brief-
ly drank and partied heavily. “I went off the
rails a tiny bit but I had to do that. I knew
where I needed to be.”
Munro and Peaty had only been to-
gether two months when she became
pregnant and he has admitted that he
wasn’t initially delighted by the news,
which was broken over the phone while he
was in Australia. But lockdown gave the
three a chance to bond. “A family gives you
perspective. Swimming is not the only
thing I live and breathe now. I come back
after a shit day or a good day, I’m still going
to get a smile from them. I love that feeling
of being a provider for my family. I take
huge pride in that.”
It’s an old-school stance; his ambitions
for George are similarly out of kilter with
his other millennial philosophies. “He will
not go to a school where they give out med-
als for participating; he will go to a school
where they give medals for coming one, two
and three. I’m very firm on that because
that is what life is. I want him to go through
a system where he has to fight to come first.
I don’t want [my son] to be given any oppor-
tunity to think you can be successful by just
turning up; you’ve got to turn up and you’ve
got to dominate and you’ve got to do abso-
lutely everything to do that. Nothing an-
noys me more than slowness.”
Still, between now and Christmas
Peaty’s going to try to take it easier, with a
holiday planned — probably in Dubai. Is
he actually going to chill on a sunlounger?
“I really, really hope so. It’s very important
to take a break from everything, not just
social media, before I go again.”
So he’s not retiring? “Absolutely not!
Hopefully I’ll go faster after this. I want to
carry on until Los Angeles 2028. You’ve
got to work really hard in sport. It’s one of
the most cut-throat things you can be in-
volved with. But you’ve got to look after
yourself. You’ve got to have a reset.”
The Gladiator Mindset is out now
(Quercus Books, £20)Adam
Peaty’s
perfect
we ekend
Adam Peaty
with his partner,
Eiri MunroGreen juice or fry-up?
Green juice
Owl or lark?
Owl — I have to get up
at 6.30am for training
but I don’t like it
Water or wine?
Wine, though I’m sober
ten months of the year
What’s your
signature dish?
Fajitas. I love anything
with a tomato sauce
I couldn’t get through
the weekend without...
Music. It can be classical
or grime, I like every sortth
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bbeentestedafterPeaty’sA
verth tiPeaty at the Tokyo Olympics‘Strictly was harder
than winning
the Olympics’