Read interview in The Scotsman

“During competition you have to go into yourself, but you have to have the same kind of spatial awareness of the crowd, the arena, and how that can pull into your performance. The energy from the crowd or your competitors can contribute in a very positive way to your performance. It can also be detrimental. The best technical swimming will never be done in competition. The evolution of swimming happens in training.”

A gold medal swim, then, isn’t necessarily someone’s best performance, just their fastest? “Sometimes you’ve been very successful and it wasn’t, technically, your best performance. I look back at some of my competitions and there are huge mistakes. You have to be good enough in training so that on a bad day in competition you’re still good enough to be able to perform.”