Three-time Olympic champion Adam Peaty believes that the introduction of more 50m events at LA 2028 is the key to greater personalities in swimming.
The 30-year-old announced his bid to compete at a fourth Olympic Games in April, after the organising committee for the LA 2028 Olympic Games revealed that the 50m breaststroke, backstroke and butterfly events would be added to the swimming programme for the first time in history.
Peaty is a three-time world champion, four-time European champion and the current world record holder in the 50m breaststroke; he is still the only person in history to dip under 26 seconds.
He now hopes that the inclusion of the 50m events can be the move that swimming needs to bring more eyes to the sport, driving bigger characters to the forefront.
"As a sport, you need the personalities to thrive for as long as you can because that makes them marketable," he said.
"One thing this sport needs is more marketable athletes and you can get that through sprinters, because we’re a bit more ego based.
"I remember getting a phone call and them saying that they were 99 per cent sure the 50s were going to be added.
"It's brilliant, not just from a selfish perspective, but we have plenty of British athletes who are strong over 50m.
"All those athletes who were in a similar position to me, thinking whether they should give up and stop, having the 50s now opens up a whole new playground."
Peaty had publicly announced that he would be taking a break from the sport after Paris 2024, having openly discussed his struggles away from the pool in the lead up to a third Olympics.
But a conversation with fiancée Holly Ramsay at Christmas made him realise that he was not quite done in the pool, with ambitions to come back even before the 50m had been officially added.
It's a return that has seen him move from his previous base of Loughborough University Performance Centre, back to his original Rio 2016 roots at Repton, in a fresh new change.
"I’ve been very vocal about how the day I got home from Paris I said I was done," he said.
"I was just so exhausted and tired from all the preparation and at the final hurdle I was quite ill and had to race with that.
"I was heartbroken because of those circumstances that I had to perform under and I had to take myself away from the sport.
"But I had a conversation with my fiancée Holly in the car in December and I just said that I really missed it and I would regret it if I didn't go for it again.
"When you go through those hard times you can't let it defeat you."
But overcoming defeat is a message Peaty is not just taking on himself, but one that he is intent on helping young aspiring swimmers understand, on his mission to get more eyes on the pool.
"This sport is one of the hardest to keep bouncing back from because every single swimming competition is the same," he added.
"We want to make that difference and I think that will help swimmers stay in the sport longer."
When Peaty says he wants to make a difference, he doesn't just stand back and wait for it to happen.
Find out more: Adam Peaty Opens Up About Paris 2024
The three-time Olympic champion set up his own brand 'AP Race' back in 2019 alongside good friend and former swimmer Ed Baxter. The company has since rocketed to global success, hosting its own annual international swimming competition at the London Aquatics Centre.
It was there that the breaststroker made his return to international competition post-Paris 2024, but not quite in the way anyone expected.
"Everything we do at AP Racing is about change," he said. "We had these conversations about what we could do to make this competition special and speaking to Kyle [Sockwell] he said 'why don't you race me in jorts' and I just thought 'why not'."
And so, Peaty dived in for three highly-anticipated 50m head-to-head races in London, donning not his usual tech suit, but a pair of jean shorts.
His opponent, was US swimming influencer Kyle Sockwell, a former college swimmer who has changed the face of social media interaction in the sport, amassing over 200,000 followers in recent years.
The races saw a storm of excitement for both aspiring and elite athletes from around the world, with the British Olympian coming out on top in two of the three races, defeated only when he was wearing a pair of full-length blue jeans.
Complete with walk out music, fireworks and a boxing-style entrance, Peaty hopes that the atmosphere the unconventional race created can inspire a change in pace for swimming competitions around the world.
Just one more step towards enticing a bigger audience.
"Everyone has come up to me this weekend and told me that they are so excited about these races," he said.
"That is what this sport needs, we have all of these Olympic and world standards and programmed races but why can’t we just sprinkle in a bit of fun.
"We’ve seen in the last few Olympic cycles that every sport is adapting to the modern world and swimming needs to come through do the same.
"We need to provide something different and make it fun and engaging at the heart of the sport."
Sportsbeat 2025