Peaty & Hopkin Among Brits Training On Australia’s Gold Coast

With the 2023 Long Course World Championships set for July, nations around the world are already beginning their journeys toward qualification.

For British swimmers, all eyes are on the nation’s Swimming Championships in April, the sole selection meet for Fukuoka. To help prepare for this high-pressure competition, several British stars remained down under in Australia after competing at the Short Course World Championships in Melbourne.

Two of the swimmers taking part in training camps on the Gold Coast were 26-year-old freestyle ace Anna Hopkin and 28-year-old Adam Peaty.

Multi-Olympic champion Peaty spent time with fellow Olympic champion Kyle Chalmers in South Australia before heading to the Gold Coast. The pair toured Chalmers’ hometown of Port Lincoln where Peaty described the environment as ‘very hot and very humid.’

Peaty told SwimSwam he is looking forward to 200m breaststroke World Record holder Zac Stubblety-Cook joining him, as well as Commonwealth Games bronze medalist Sam Williamson. He said he anticipates the training trio ‘pushing each other to new heights’ during the 6-week-long camp that includes 10 long course sessions per week.

Eventually, Peaty will return to Great Britain and then head out to the Lausanne Swim Cup which is on the calendar for February 24th – February 26th. He also expects to race at the Edinburgh International Swim Meet set for March 10th through March 12th before the aforementioned British Swimming Championships in April.

As for Hopkin, reflecting on her past year, the former Arkansas Razorback calls 2022 ‘a mixed bag’, despite having taken bronze in the women’s 50m freestyle in Melbourne. During her busy summer, she also collected 3 relay medals at the Commonwealth Games as well as a trio of relay medals at the European Championships.

Loughborough’s Hopkin stated, “Overall, I would have liked to have swum better, especially as an individual but I gained some really good race exposure given we had three major long-course Championships and I think I handled the volume of racing really well.

“I also had some good relay success at both Europeans and Commonwealths as well as finishing the year off with an individual bronze at the World Short Course Championships which was definitely a highlight for me. I think other [highlights] would be retaining our European title in the 4x100m Freestyle Relay, after a very long season we still managed to put together a really good race which bodes well for the coming years, then getting that 50m Freestyle bronze at World Short Course. I really wanted an individual medal this year and I fell short a few times so to get one at the last competition of the year meant a lot.”

In terms of the annual trek to the Gold Coast, Hopkin said, “I think these camps are really useful, it focuses the mind to push harder for that block we’re away and there’s no home distractions to take away from training. Training is also really tough in the heat – even when you’re in the pool, the air temperature is much higher than we’re used to which adds an additional challenge,” she said.

“The atmosphere is really good, it’s a small, tight-knit group and we all push each other. There’s a lot of hard work to come but we’re very lucky to be able to train in such a beautiful part of the world in the sunshine.”

“I think schedule wise, it’s pretty similar. We still do the same amount of sessions, although we tend to add in more circuit training and have more time to focus on pre-pool and post-training recovery. Generally, training is just a step up from what we would do back home because we have a short amount of time to make as many gains as possible.”