Adam Peaty – a legendary performer in the pool

Superlatives proliferate when swimmer Adam Peaty’s name crops up. At the World Championships in Budapest this week, he won the 100m, again, and the 50m, again. He broke his own championship record in one event, and his own world record in the other, twice. Rebecca Adlington, double Olympic champion said: “He is the poster boy for swimming across the world, not just in Britain. No one is even close to him, so you ask yourself how much more can he improve”. The only man who has matched Peaty’s winning margin in a sprint is Michael Phelps.

A commentator said: “He has the perfect physique. Large hands, large feet, and hyper-mobile, double-jointed knees and ankles. But in swimming, the gifts you’re born with are never enough. It demands lunatic commitment.”

He gets up at 6am to train, completing three two-hour sessions a day, six days a week. In peak training, he will swim seven miles a day, every day but Sunday. That’s 1,680 lengths a week, up and down the same lanes. He eats 8,000 calories a day, but he only has 6% body fat and has an extraordinary cardiovascular system.

Born 28 December 1994 in Uttoxeter, England, he famously disliked water as a baby, but at one point decided that swimming was all he was good at. He’s a Sun Capricorn trine Mars in Virgo; with Mercury, Neptune, Uranus also in Capricorn – very earthy and ambitious. His Moon along with Venus and Pluto are in intense Scorpio and his Saturn is in Pisces – so it’s a Water Earth chart which gives him great inner strength and determination. What really dominates his chart is a T square of a disciplined Mars opposition Saturn squaring onto a supremely confident Jupiter in Sagittarius conjunct Pluto. So he’s turned an afflicted Mars – square Pluto and opposition Saturn – to very constructive ends.

He evidently does have strong self-belief and likes to quote Mike Tyson. “Every step I get closer to that ring, I tell myself I’m a God and no one can beat me.”

He says he would be a Royal Marine if he wasn’t a swimmer, which would also suit his Mars.