Adam Peaty: how religion and the Ramsays saved me

In a photography studio in an insalubrious section of central Birmingham, the most decorated breaststroker in swimming history is browsing the breakfast options. Less than 48 hours earlier, Adam Peaty was still in the Olympic Village in Paris, with its now notorious cardboard beds and, judging from Peaty’s comments on the canteen, “worms in the fish”, plus, according to him, questions over a Chinese relay team and whether they claimed gold thanks to an unsporting advantage — ie doping. (“Are they getting tested at 6am on a Sunday morning, like I am, in China?” he said. “We just need people to do their job.”)
This morning’s Pret A Manger spread looks reassuringly worm-free, and though I’ve been asked not to bring up Peaty’s comments — on the fish or the foul play — the swimmer stands firmly by the latter. “I’m just saying what I say,” he says with a shrug. “Not many people are being held accountable.”
We park ourselves on a couple of low leather sofas, all 6ft 3in and 15-odd stone of Olympian folded opposite me: hulking biceps, shoulders like boulders in a sleeveless green vest and long double-jointed legs, all looking far too large for their surroundings. He tears open a green juice with his giant shovel hands.
It’s still several days before the Paris Games come to a close but, post-Covid, athletes no longer hang around for a flags and fireworks finale once their own events are over. “Which is a shame for the new generation because they don’t get to experience it,” Peaty says. “But I can understand it. For the people still inside the village it’s about performance, and if you’ve finished then you’ve nothing else to do.”
I get the impression that he wasn’t particularly sad to exit to the Eurostar. “There are a few positives. Not too many,” he says of the Games. “I don’t want to think of Paris as a negative time in my life, but I’m still in that headspace of debriefing it. And obviously a lot of things went right, a lot of things went wrong.”
Decompressing is a process, he says. “It’s never a state of, ‘OK, I’ve decompressed now. I’m good to go.’ I’ll probably be thinking about it in two years’ time, four years’ time.”
Peaty thinks a lot. The last time we met, in September 2021, he tapped his gingery buzzcut and told me, “The mind is the athlete. The body is simply the means.”
Not only for the past 14 months — following a break-up, a breakdown and a dramatic comeback — but for much of the past 14 years, Peaty’s near-militaristic regime has meant swimming 12,000m a day, every day. The prospect of free time must feel a little like freefall.
“They call it the ‘Olympic blues’ for a reason,” he says. “You’ve had an overarching purpose that you’ll do anything for, and team-mates who are looking for exactly the same, and you’ve got about 40 staff asking how your day is every day, and that’s just not normal. It’s a bubble. So take all those things away and you go home and it’s like, ‘OK, what’s next?’
“If it’s your first or second Games, you’ll struggle with that,” he says. Peaty is now a veteran of three. But still, he says, “I do struggle with not really having much agenda for the day.”
At the Rio Games in 2016, where he became the first British male swimming champion since 1988, Peaty was just 21; this December, he will turn 30.
“I was a boy in Rio and now I think, well, I’ve almost become a man,” he says with a grin.
Ironically, though, Peaty looks more boyish today than when we last met. Back then, off the back of gold medal success at the delayed Tokyo Games — where he made history as the first British swimmer successfully to defend an Olympic title — Peaty was slipping into snug trousers for a glitzy turn on Strictly.
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Almost three years on, he actually looks younger, brighter and healthier. And gone, it seems, is the relentless restlessness. Not physically — he still folds and unfolds his long legs and enormous arms endlessly, pulls his shorts down and his socks up, and fiddles with anything he can find — but there’s a calmer, quieter manner and mood.
That could, of course, just be the Covid. The day after competing in the men’s 100m breaststroke final in Paris, Peaty tested positive for the virus and spent the next three days in bed. Ten days on, “I’m still a bit poorly,” he says. “I can’t really hear out of my left ear; I’ve still got a chest infection. I got hit hard with that illness. I was completely wiped out.”
It’s impossible to know whether, Covid-free, the double gold medal-winning Olympian might have made it a historic treble. In the event, Peaty took silver, missing out on first place to Italy’s Nicolo Martinenghi by just 0.02 seconds. And he won’t speculate.
“I just don’t think it’s worth even thinking about that, because it’s not going to change anything,” he says. “I gave it my best with the cards I was dealt, and we got a good outcome.”
In a BBC interview poolside immediately following the race, an emotional Peaty shed tears while speaking to Sharron Davies. “I am not crying because I have come second,” he insisted. “I am crying because of how much it took to get here. In my heart I have won. These are happy tears.”
It’s a far cry from the Peaty of three years ago, who was adamant that, “Second, for me, is losing.
“Some people may see second as a victory. People celebrate second,” he said. “But for me that’s not good enough. It’s win or lose.”
Reading his quotes back to him feels cruel, especially today, but it’s impossible to skirt over the stark change in his attitude.
“I’m a different person,” he says. “In the sense of my approach to the sport, but also my approach to life. I don’t define my life by medals.
“We all die one day, and we can’t take it with us, but those memories and the way we approach things, and hopefully the way we inspire others through those, that’s what’s going to be left behind. Not the actual medal itself. So I don’t let it define me any more.”
In our previous conversation I was also struck by the warlike, gladiatorial nature of much of Peaty’s language. “Yes, military tactics,” he agreed. “Outmanoeuvring, outflanking, a war of attrition, a siege.” Even his 2021 book was called The Gladiator Mindset.
“It’s been my objective to get away from that kind of mentality all the time,” he says today. “I think there’s a time and a place to use it, but maybe not to the extent that I had.”
After waging war for so long — on his rivals, on races, on the pool, on himself — is he saying he has now found… peace?
“Yes! And peace, that’s the thing you want, isn’t it?” he says. “It’s not sustainable to be angry and fighting all the time.”
This peace, he says, has come “definitely from my faith, first”. Where he used to say he felt “like a god in the pool”, now he’s got actual God. Peaty proudly describes himself as “a religious man”, invokes the words “faith” and “religion” 11 times in our hour together, and even goes so far as to say, “I’d rather have my faith and my relationship with Jesus and come second than have gold.”
Unexpected though it may seem, Peaty’s new-found piety didn’t come completely out of nowhere. He was raised Catholic and was always quasi-spiritual in his philosophy, relating to ideas of universal energy and karma.
Now, however, he attends an evangelical church every Sunday. Does he pray? “Of course.” He also journals, “though not every day”.
His newest inkings reflect this fervour: there’s a cross on his torso, just above the mantra “Into the Light”, and a large dove on his dinner plate-sized left pec.
These sit, somewhat incongruously, alongside Achilles, Athena, Poseidon, a Spartan warrior and a lion.
Peaty claims he never thinks too hard about his new tattoos until the morning of. “You can probably tell I don’t worry about much,” he says, which is clearly nonsense — he’s obviously a massive worrier, just not about his temporal flesh suit.
I ramble something about athletes and physique and embodiment. “Exactly,” he says with a grin. “I’m a swimmer, so I’m pretty much naked all the time. I’m not exactly insecure about my body.”
Crucial to Peaty’s conversion has been Ashley Null, an American academic and theologian who specialises in elite sports chaplaincy.
The pair had a Zoom call in early 2023, when Peaty was at a particularly low point. “He said, ‘I come to London once a month for theology work in the library, so I’ll come up and see you. I’ll meet you here at this church in Nottingham,’ ” Peaty recalls. “Then we discussed certain things around athletes, of where they place their joy, where they place their rewards.”
Null, he tells me, believes “the gold medal is the coldest thing you’ll ever wear”. Because, “You’re expecting it to solve all your issues. And it might solve some of them, but it will not solve the majority.”
In fact, Peaty says, “When you win Olympic gold, that does come at a cost. You’ve got to sacrifice your relationships with your family, because of the time. You’ve got to miss out on key moments of your life and put training first, swimming first. The list goes on,” he says. “That’s the cost of gold.”
Null, he says, has also taught him that “anyone that is successful has successful relationships with people”. And that’s hit home for Peaty, who told me previously, “I’ve never been able to stay in a relationship because my sport is so demanding. I’m very selfish. I’m an athlete. The best athletes in the world have to look after themselves first.”
Now, he says, “As soon as you define your whole life by medals, you’ll have no one to share it with. I’d rather get silver and have someone to share it with than gold and be on my own.”
Happily, the former is now the case. The other major factor in Peaty’s new-found peace is his girlfriend, Holly Ramsay, the 24-year-old daughter of Gordon. He first met her via her sister Tilly when they both competed in Strictly.
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Peaty was, at the time, still with his previous partner, Eiri Munro, the mother of his three-year-old son, George. The couple had met on Tinder and when, just two months later, Munro discovered she was pregnant, Peaty’s reaction was, “I’m not prepared to be a father.” But they gave things a go and in September 2021, when George was turning one, Peaty called Munro “a great mother, a great person. But,” he said, “it’s not a Hollywood thing. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows.”
A year later, the couple broke up, the split contributing to what would become a dramatic decline for Peaty for the next several months. Then he and Ramsay went public in June 2023.
He seems happy, mentioning “Hol” frequently. “Yes, she’s brilliant,” he gushes. “She’s been pinnacle [sic] to this moment in my life where I can have peace and I can have that kind of love where it’s not defined by anything else other than the connection that we have. It’s great, and I look forward to the future.”
He’s made no bones about the fact that he sees their future together and, “I definitely want more kids.” He’s the youngest of four while Ramsay is one of six, and family is important to them both.
Peaty has spoken of the help and support Gordon Ramsay has given him too, saying, “He just inspires me to be successful.” Gordon is, he said recently, “a high-level… great person”, while the Ramsays are all “incredible people, an incredible family. Very supportive, very welcoming, very loving.
“The family values are very similar to mine,” he says. “And the way that Holly has been brought up is something that I see in her, and is just so attractive for me.”
Growing up in Uttoxeter in the East Midlands, where his father, Mark, was a bricklayer and his mother, Caroline, managed a nursery, the Peatys were not particularly sporty. “Complete anomaly,” he says of himself. “Which I think has its strengths because my parents just said, ‘Go out there, do your best,’ and let me lead my own career.”
It did mean, however, that he came to competitive swimming relatively late, at 14, when his now longtime coach, Mel Marshall, spotted him at the City of Derby Swimming Club doing laps and looking “like a JCB eating up the water”.
For much of his twenties, Peaty was a medal machine and a record wrecker. Having set the fastest times in both the 50m and 100m breaststroke, he has broken the world record 14 times, and was the first man to swim under 26 seconds for the 50m breaststroke and under both 58 and 57 seconds in the 100m.
Then, in 2022, began a run of bad luck. In May of that year he fractured a bone in his foot — “That was the start of a downward spiral; that was a catalyst” — which meant missing the European and World Championships. Then came his break-up with Munro that autumn and “a lot of instability in my life”, including adjusting to not living full-time with George. At a ten-week training camp in Australia in early 2023, he could not shake off persistent illness “with my tonsils, sinuses, chest. I’d clear it and then it would come back a week later, and then I’d have to go on stronger antibiotics.”
Out of the pool, meanwhile, he was dealing with his challenges in the time-honoured fashion: with alcohol. “Life lost its fun, its colour, its joy,” he has said. “It was good to feel numb for a while.”
The crunch moment came in February 2023 in the pool in Loughborough, where he ploughed through his daily 12,000m. He began swimming to find his goggles filling with tears and, for the first time in his career, abandoned the training session. His tears continued in the shower. “I lost all sense of direction and purpose. I thought, ‘Why am I even here?’ ” he said. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this any more.’ ”
So he stepped back. Not for a long time, just a few months, but long enough to give him some new perspective. “Life, it’s not actually too bad without swimming. If anything, it’s better,” he says, grinning. But it was also long enough to realise he wanted another shot.
“It hurts like nothing I’ve ever experienced when you touch the wall and you don’t get what you want,” he said in Paris. “It does hurt. Of course it does,” he says today. “But it’s also set me free. And the pain of losing is always going to be less than the pain of regret. So just go for it, because your brain will always find reasons not to be happy and not to do things if you let it.”
Post-breakdown, post-comeback, he’s “all about balance”, he says. “Everything in moderation.” There’s nothing remotely moderate about Peaty apart from, perhaps, his attitude to drinking now. He hasn’t gone full celebrity sober. “I like a nice meal with a nice glass of wine. But I don’t get my reward from partying now.”
He thinks his drinking and partying were anyway “an excuse to hide”, whereas, “I’ve got nothing to hide from now. I’m much more comfortable in my own skin. I didn’t even know my own brain until the last year, really.”
And it’s a busy brain. A couple of years ago, Peaty was diagnosed with ADHD. “I think it [the diagnosis] was helpful, but it’s never an excuse for me,” he says, characteristically keen never to be asking for special measures. But he can’t sit down and read a book, he says, or watch a film. “I have to have an audiobook on while I’m vacuuming.”
I ask whether he’s ever tried therapy. “Hated it,” he says. “I don’t like it, so I don’t do it any more — it didn’t have the answers I was looking for.”
But, he says, “I think, for me, the church and the people in it, and the Bible and my relationship with my faith — that has most of the answers, if not all of them.”
The man who once spoke of Project Immortal, his goal of setting a record that could never be broken, appears no longer to be driven by that particular flavour of immortality. “My legacy will be through what I do next, and how I can support athletes that come through working-class backgrounds like I came through — people who haven’t got many resources,” he says. “It’s all about impact and positive change and guiding the next generation.”
But he’s never made a secret of wanting a last hurrah, and even two days post-Paris, the question of the Los Angeles Games in 2028 hangs in the air.
“I’m going to stay fit and I’m going to train for two years,” he says. “But I’m going to take a break, put other things forward as a priority. I really enjoy public speaking now and motivating people.” He also oversees AP Race, his organisation to provide opportunities to young swimmers.
“It’s trying to get a balance with my work and trying to find out who I am away from sport.
“And knowing what I’ve done in the past 14 months, I only need two years really,” he continues. “So we’ll look at the landscape in ’26 and if that contract’s worth writing for me, I’ll write it and I’ll train the hardest I can.”
When he wrote the contract with himself for Paris, “I said, I’m only coming back because I want to. I want to do it and see what I can do.
“Winning golds, winning silvers, whatever, that’s not a motivation any more, because I just wake up the next day and I’m like, ‘OK, whatever,’ ” he says.
“I’ve won worlds, I’ve won Europeans, I’ve won Commonwealths, I’ve won Olympics. I’ve got world records. I’ve won everything there is to win in my event. I have nothing to prove.”
Adam Peaty is an ambassador for the performance sportswear brand Castore (castore.com)