In the eight-year stretch when Adam Peaty won his first two Olympic gold medals and did not lose a single race, we looked upon him as a machine.
He won and won and won. He obliterated the field at the Rio Games in 2016 and was imperious again in Tokyo in 2021.
He betrayed neither vulnerability nor fragility. He swam as if he would swim forever. He was British sport’s great Invincible.
But by on Sunday night, when he launched himself off his blocks at the magnificent La Defense Arena at the start of the men’s 100 metres breaststroke final, we knew he was not invincible.
We knew he was not a machine and that he was a man, a man with a hinterland, a man who has doubts and fears and weaknesses like everyone else.
Adam Peaty pictured during Sunday’s 100 metres Olympic breaststroke final at Paris 2024
Peaty took home the silver medal after finishing 0.02 seconds behind Nicolo Martinenghi
Despite missing out on a third straight gold in the 100m breastroke, Peaty was full of pride
Peaty also praised the new Olympic champion Italian Nicolo Martinenghi (centre) afterwards
After the torments that have afflicted him since his triumph in Tokyo three years ago, the public battle with alcohol and depression, the break he took from the sport and the defeats he has suffered, to win in Paris would have been the most stunning victory of all.
And yet, despite it all, it is hard to convey the sense of shock that reverberated around this 17,000-seat arena when Peaty touched the wall at the end of the race.
All eyes turned to the giant scoreboard at the far end of the pool and saw that it showed Peaty in second place, two hundredths of a second behind Italy’s Nicolo Martinenghi.
He has endured so much over the last few years and yet our muscle memory — and his recent performances — told us he was going to win Britain’s first gold of these Games.
Everyone looked astonished, not least Martinenghi. If anyone was going to beat Peaty, it was assumed it would be his great Chinese rival Qin Haiyang.
But to complete the feeling of dismay, Qin, one of 11 Chinese swimmers racing here despite testing positive for a banned substance three years ago, finished in seventh place.
Nicolo Martinenghi won the first gold medal of his Olympic career – after two bronzes in Tokyo
Haiyang Qin of China had been tipped to be Peaty’s closest rival but he finished in seventh spot
It was as if Peaty and Qin, swimming alongside each other in the middle of the pool, had been concentrating so hard on the other that they forgot about the Italian. ‘He burgled that gold medal,’ Olympic medallist Steve Parry said, ‘because everyone else was looking at one another in the middle of the pool.’
And so it was left to Peaty, who finished tied in second place with the American Nic Fink, to swim over to the 24-year-old Italian and embrace him with the great grace of a champion.
And later, as he stood on a lower rung of the podium and the Italian national anthem played, Peaty was unstinting in his congratulations to the winner.
By then, the shock was starting to sink in. This was not the script that had been written, not in Britain at least. It was a night of ‘ifs’, a night when the pull of history was not quite enough to drag Peaty to the wall first.
If Peaty had won, he would have been only the second man after the great American swimmer Michael Phelps to win the same individual event at three Games in a row.
Peaty pictured congratulating Martinenghi moments after Sunday’s race had ended in Paris
Former Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps has been spotted in Paris this week
Phelps was here in this magnificent arena in the midst of the raucous, partisan crowd who had nearly taken the roof off when Leon Marchand won France’s third gold medal of the Games in the men’s 400m individual medley at the start of the evening.
He was ready for the coronation of Peaty, too, it appeared, ready to anoint another great champion to stand alongside him. Perhaps we expected too much. It was only a year ago that Peaty was contemplating quitting the sport altogether.
‘In the moment,’ he said, ‘I wanted to just stop. Stop everything. I didn’t want to see a pool again. I had been beaten down again and again and again.
‘It’s been an incredibly lonely journey. The devil on my shoulder says, “You’re missing out on life, you’re not good enough, you need a drink, you can’t have what you want, you can’t be happy”.
‘I’ve been on a self-destructive spiral, which I don’t mind saying because I’m human. By saying it, I can start to find the answers. I got to a point in my career where I didn’t feel like myself — I didn’t feel happy swimming, I didn’t feel happy racing, my biggest love in the sport.
‘I’ve had my hand hovering over a self-destruct button because if I don’t get the result that I want, I self-destruct.’
In that context, it felt as if Sunday night’s result was a kind of victory. That, certainly, was how Peaty was treating it as he choked back tears when he gave an poolside interview in the aftermath of his defeat.
‘I’m not crying because I’ve come second,’ Peaty said. ‘I am crying because it just took so much to get here.
‘It’s just incredibly hard. To win it once, and to win it again, and to win it again. And to try and find new ways to win it. Everything I have done to this point has happened for a reason. And I am so happy I can race the best in the world and come second.
‘It’s not crying because I have lost. Because in my heart I have won. These are happy tears. Because I have given it my absolutely best every single day and I can’t be upset about that.
Peaty was visibly emotional following the conclusion of Sunday’s final and had tears in his eyes
‘I’m not crying because I’ve come second. I am crying because it just took so much to get here’
‘I was just one or two per cent out. I woke up this morning with something on my neck. But these are not excuses, these are just things athletes have to go through to find a way.
‘Because that is a victory for me. And to see Nicolo win makes me so happy for him. I have raced him for a long time and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. It’s still six Olympic medals for me.
‘I am a very religious man and I asked God to show my heart. And this is my heart. I couldn’t have done more.’
Peaty did not win the race in Paris last night but the smile on his face at the end suggested he has found something in his life worth more than the colour of a medal.
