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.”
