Adam Peaty urges UK after Tokyo gold: ‘Now we’ve got to switch our mindset’

After winning Great Britain’s first gold medal of the Tokyo Olympics, Adam Peaty said he hoped his victory would give some hope, joy and inspiration to his team, and to his country. “That’s why we are all here, because sport has an amazing power to inspire people, and hopefully this is going to be an amazing motivation for people,” Peaty said.

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“Hopefully this is a catalyst for not only Team GB but also the people back home to go to another gear, to say: ‘We’ve been through a tough time, there’s been a lot of complaining, a lot of excuses, a lot of negative things, but now we’ve got to switch our mindset.’”

Peaty’s words proved to be prescient. Shortly after the 26-year-old won Britain’s first gold medal of the Games, Team GB won their second and third in quick succession, with Tom Daley and Matty Lee triumphing in the men’s synchronised 10m platform final before Tom Pidcock rode to glory in the men’s cross-country mountain bike race.

Peaty said switching his mindset was what he had to do to win here. “It’s been a tough 18 months. These last 18 months, every single day has almost been in the dark,” he said. “Covid has taken a lot of fun out of things.”

In the past year he has bought a house and become a father, all while trying to get ready for these Games as best he can during all the lockdowns. “We’ve been through a tough time. The world has been through a tough time and in the UK it’s been very difficult. But for us it’s been a difficult journey. We’ve had no training camps, no racing abroad and then throw a newborn into that mix and all it gets kind of hard and complicated.” Peaty’s boy, George-Anderson, was born last September.

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“Becoming a father, buying my first house, there were some days when I woke up and thought ‘this is hard, this is really hard,’” Peaty said. “Those three weeks I was in bed and he was waking up every two hours for a nappy change, or every hour for a feed, and I thought: ‘Fuck me, this is going to be hard.’ My eyes slowly got heavier and heavier, and it was like I needed to get on that plane to go compete in the International Swimming League just so I could get some sleep, not so I could perform, just sleep. And I’ve hidden a lot from my own family, I’ve hidden a lot of stress, had a lot of those moments where it’s felt very, very hard, very different.”

In the pool, too, “it’s been hard to find that emotion, to find that kind of performance when there is no crowd, to find it when you can’t go and do what you want on the weekend, to find it when you can’t go on training camps, when there’s been hardly any international competition, so that challenge in its own has been very different, it’s been a very different preparation”, Peaty said: “There’s been so many challenges, so many challenges, and somebreakdowns as well, because I’ve thought: ‘What am I doing training three times a day, every single day?’” The answer, he said, was for moments like this.

“I’ve always believed that the 99.99% of the time we spend in the dark is for the 0.01% we spend in the light.”