Team GB’s swimmers returned to Heathrow to be greeted by a welcome marked by quiet wonderment.
There was no hysteria. The protocol for how to greet a returning hero during a pandemic had not been fully thought through and so the main emotion was one of impatience, to get their loved ones home to dissect their medal successes.
Before the trip to the car park, however, the swimmers — flanked by Jack Buckner, the chief executive of British Swimming, and Tim Jones, British Swimming’s head of elite development — had to deliver a press conference, attempting to ignore siblings and partners gesturing for them to hurry up and the crying of a baby.
It was worth addressing the media. Team GB won eight medals in the pool in Tokyo 2020 and it was the first time in 113 years that Britain won four swimming golds at one Olympics. Their mantra had been “one team, winning in water” and that the competitors and staff had created a sense of family was the overriding theme.
How had they all coped not having relatives in Japan to cheer them on?
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“We are a family,” Jones said. “It was a hard bubble, but it went like that,” he said, as he clicked his fingers.
There was almost no time at all for the team to wallow in their success. Has a medal target been set for the Paris Games in 2024?
“It’s high-performance sport and you don’t stand still,” Jones said. “We never mention medals to the athletes, we talk about the process.” To illustrate his point, he added that if you execute the detail to perfection, medals will automatically follow. No manager of Manchester United, he said, would predict the exact scoreline of the next match.
It will become known as “the 1908 press conference”, that having been the most recent comparable year in terms of medal haul.
“So much stuff happened in 1908,” Adam Peaty, the only competitor who admitted to having drunk champagne on the flight home, said, laughing.
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The 100m breaststroke champion was in relatively feisty mood and used the term “outrageous” a few times to describe the approach of the team, saying, “People are scared to race us now.”
“There is no point in any of these medals,” he added, “unless we inspire kids.”
Peaty won the country’s first gold at the Games and so perhaps that was why he felt he could proclaim that, “We’re not scared to win.”
It may seem an odd thing to say but there is certainly an aura that comes with winning, with expecting victory, with not being overwhelmed by success, and it is an aura that rubs off both on newcomers and competitors.
There was a by-now compulsory joke at the expense of James Guy, whose tears fell freely as the medals were won, but Guy was unapologetic, and, naturally, wept upon seeing his parents in the airport hotel.
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If you turned away from the swimmers and gazed instead at their families, you could see why this may be the start of swimming greatness rather than its zenith.
“We want this to be the beginning of something special,” Buckner said, “not just a blip.”
