ADAM PEATY has bravely opened up on his mental health battle as he prepares to compete at Paris 2024.
The road to selection for a third Olympic Games has been anything but straightforward for the three-time gold medallist.
Peaty, 29, is among Team GB‘s most high-profile stars heading to Paris this summer.
He’d tell you himself, however, that achieving such greatness comes at a significant cost.
“I’ll always have high expectations. My standards are so high because I take it to a place not many people have gone,” Peaty recently told Men’s Health UK.
“That mentality has got me medals, but it has cost me… Medals are the coldest thing you wear because in pursuit of greatness, you’ll destroy relationships.
“People will tell you there’s a choice, but there is no choice; it’s win or lose. I’ve got to be willing to go all in for a victory.
“Most of the time you have to be selfish to achieve the goals I’m striving for.”
Peaty welcomed son George in September 2020 with partner Eirianedd Munro.
He subsequently split with long-term partner Eirianedd in 2022, and is now dating Holly Ramsay, daughter of TV chef Gordon.
For Peaty, surrounding himself with the right people has been key.
Looking back at what he’s achieved, he said: “I have a great team around me.
“From the people at Aquatics GB, the people around me every day, the people I see on Sunday at church, my family, Holly.
“It’s an incredible team and it’s taken so long to get it right. I look at pictures of 2016, with my crooked teeth, half the muscle.
“Then in Tokyo I was a dad for the first time, I looked a little bit older, but I was still a boy. This cycle, it’s been wild.”
Despite having taken home two golds and a silver in Tokyo at the delayed Games three years ago, Peaty’s participation at Paris 2024 was not always a given.
On the considerable challenges he has faced, including depression and alcohol use, Peaty reflected: “I got to a place where I didn’t want to look at a pool.
“It took me a long time to get over that period… It was only last year that I started to face what I’d been going through in a healthy manner. The answers can’t be found in a nightclub, or some of the stuff that I’d been doing.
It requires so much maturity to face yourself in the mirror and admit that your behaviour is not acceptable
Adam Peaty
“It had to be found in true accountability, tough and deep conversations with people around me. It requires so much maturity to face yourself in the mirror and admit that your behaviour is not acceptable.”
Following a gruelling training camp in Australia, Peaty reached breaking point.
“For eight months afterwards, I found myself crying all the time – the sport had broken me,” he admitted.
“You know when Bane breaks Batman’s back? It’s what swimming did to me… You’re doing 12,000m a day, plus gym, plus nutrition, plus everything else in your life.
“I was a father, a partner, a business manager – trying to manage my own future at the same time.”
I was within a hair of giving it all up
Adam Peaty
On what brought him back from the brink of quitting altogether, he revealed: “I was within a hair of giving it all up. What was I going back for? Pride? It took a while to find the answer.
“But I wanted to teach [my son] George and any other children I have in future that you don’t give up when things get hard or the world feels like it’s against you.
“You give up when the time is right. I can take losses, but I couldn’t take regret. Regret would eat any man inside out.”
Peaty then went on to add: “I burned out in March last year. I had no answers to what I was trying to find. I’d have to change my whole life if I had any aspirations to qualify for the Olympics again.”
Having now “mastered the art of staying present”, Peaty is aiming for glory once again in Paris.
He qualified for the Games back in April when, little over a year on from burning out, the hulking 6ft 3in star won the British 100m breaststroke title at London Aquatics Centre.
In doing so, Peaty recorded a time of 57.94 seconds, his best since successfully defending his Olympic title in 2021.
At the time, he said: “It may not end up as a fairytale, but it might…”
Peaty and his considerable fanbase will find out when he competes at the Olympic Aquatics Centre in Saint-Denis next month.
The full interview and video are available to Men’s Health Squad members now on the MH app, or read it in the magazine from 25th June
