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He beat his chest, he beat the rest and then he roared to the roof. For a guy who claimed he wasn’t so bothered about dodging a second bolt of lightning, Adam Peaty exposed himself once more as an immense swimmer and a terrible liar.
Only the Commonwealth Games? Only a stepping stone to better dances in Paris? Both indisputably true. And each a monumental nonsense when it comes to the competitive instincts of a man more obsessed with gold than the average dragon.
Not his beast of choice, of course. No. He talks of lions. He loves them, has a massive one tattooed on his arm. And when he was beaten on Sunday, in his first 100m breaststroke defeat in eight years, he warned that you don’t back a lion into a corner. That you get bitten.
Adam Peaty ended an emotional roller coaster by claiming gold in the 50m breaststroke final
Here, in the sequel across 50m at Sandwell Aquatics Centre, he chewed them up and spat them out. All seven of them, including his English team-mate James Wilby, whose beating of the three-time Olympic champion 48 hours earlier sparked an existential crisis within Peaty that was so severe he muddled his own scripts.
One minute he was ‘devastated’. The next he didn’t know if he loved swimming and he wasn’t fussed by defeats on lesser stages, anyway. He laid it on so thick he was accused by Mark Foster of ‘disrespecting’ the Games.
Across 26.76sec, Peaty’s quickest 50m since 2020, way before the broken foot 10 weeks ago that introduced jeopardy to a sure thing, far clearer truths emerged. Indeed, after winning by more than 0.2sec from Australia’s Sam Williamson, his yell could be heard above 5,000 in this arena; after escaping from view he gave an even sharper view of just how objectionable he finds any brand of defeat.
The 27-year-old celebrates wildly after winning the 50m breaststroke final in Birmingham
‘Following the 100 I was at the lowest of the low,’ he went on to say. ‘I had something which was almost…
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Source : dailymail
