A Decade of Dominance: 10 Years Since Adam Peaty’s First 57-Second Breaststroke

Ten years ago last week Adam Peaty shocked the world for the first of many times, with the first-ever sub-58 swim to take gold at the 2015 British Championships. His swim of 57.92 broke Cameron Van Der Burgh‘s three-year-old World Record by over half a second, and it would be understating his dominance since then to say that he’s never looked back. He holds 19 of the top-25 times, and all of the top-14.

NEW. WORLD. RECORD. Men’s 100m breaststroke. Take a bow @adam_peaty! #BSC15 pic.twitter.com/xd1xPSVcLD

— Team GB (@TeamGB) April 17, 2015

At the time, his first world record was not the seismic shift it would become with hindsight. The 100 breaststroke had been dropping at a reasonably consistent rate, settling into a rough seven-year cycle of breaking each second barrier. Peaty’s swim was right on this timeline, six years and eight months after Kosuke Kitajima went 58.91 at the Beijing Olympics to break 59 seconds for the first time.

The Uttoxeter native had been under 59 seconds multiple times in 2014, winning the 100 breaststroke at both the European Championships and Commonwealth Games with a pair of 58.9’s. He had swum his PB of 58.68 in the semi-finals of the former, only two-tenths slower than the at-the-time world record of 58.46 held by the man he’d beaten into second at the latter, Cameron Van Der Burgh.

That marked a 1.24-second drop in the 100 breast in the 2013/14 season for Peaty – marking a fifth-straight year of dropping at least nine-tenths of a second in this event.  The 2012/13 season had been his breakout, going from 1:02.35 to 59.92, breaking the minute barrier for the first time at that year’s British Summer Championships.

That would have placed sixth at the 2013 World Championships, held in Barcelona the same week, just ahead of Kitajima. Not a bad return for someone who hadn’t made it out of the heats the year before at the European Junior Championships.

With all that in mind, his 0.76 drop in London almost seemed inevitable. This was a swimmer still on the rise who was still a way off his potential, at the very top of the sprint breaststroke world. He’d set a World Record in the 50 the year before aged just 19 and had hit a personal best in the 100 at British Champs every year he’d competed, a run of five years.

At the end of 2015 Peaty’s World Record was 0.54 seconds ahead of the #2 ranked swimmer all-time. That was the second largest margin in 40 years; John Hencken‘s 0.73 margin over Mikhail Kryukin at the end of 1974 the only one greater. The gap here was already considerable, with the probability of one this large in the 100 breaststroke only 5.27%.

At no point since has anyone else swum a time starting with the same two digits as Peaty’s best.

The Dominance In Numbers

Going back to that earlier table, here’s what a world without Adam Peaty looks like

That is a big difference. It should be expected that as the times come down, it gets harder to take time off. Peaty made something of a mockery of that by breaking 57 only four years after his first sub-58, but it’s been a slow road for the rest of the world.

It’s easy to tell by comparing the WR to the all-time #2 swimmer. The last time this was over half a second was back in 1974, and the median gap in the 50 years since has been 0.32 seconds. At his peak Peaty was 1.41 seconds ahead. Statistically, that is so dominant there’s an almost zero chance of it ever happening again. The probability of it happening once was 0.0000000004 (that’s nine zeroes).

The red line there probably isn’t needed.

Dominant Beginnings

Peaty won his World Championship gold at the first attempt later in 2015, taking the sprint breaststroke double to go along with the inaugural 4x100m mixed medley. He was slightly off his best in the 100 to go 58.52 but was 58.18 in the semi-finals, the second-fastest swim in history at the time.

Rio 2016 was Peaty’s superstar breakout. His three individual swims there are still faster than anyone else has ever swum, and he dropped his World Record down by 0.79 to 57.13, nearly breaking the 57-second barrier only a year after cracking 58.

He won that race by 1.56 seconds. That’s more than the combined winning margin in this race at the Olympics from 1992-2012 (1.46), and was a 2.65% margin of victory. Peaty would have won if the pool in his lane had been a metre longer than everyone else’s.

His relay splits were also mind-blowing. A supersuited Breton Rickard was the only other man to have broken 58 seconds with a 57.80 back in 2009; Peaty went 56.59. He was more than two seconds quicker than anyone else in the field and ran down bronze medalist Cody Miller from nearly two seconds back.

GB would go on to finish second, but the stage was set for a five-year period where Peaty terrorised all-comers in the medley relay. He is still the only man with a split under 57.2.

Star on the World Stage

With Phelps bowing out after Rio, Peaty became the biggest active name in swimming. His sprint breaststroke dominance was only matched by Katie Ledecky in distance freestyle, and he fundamentally changed the calculus in his events. For his competitors it was no longer a question of ‘what can we do to win?’, but a fight for silver even before the buzzer sounded. To quote Andy Bull in 2017, “Peaty doesn’t have competitors, he has flotsam.”.

The next few years were a parade of records and silverware. The only long course race he lost between 2016 and 2021 was the 50m breaststroke at the 2018 Commonwealth Games to Van der Burgh, winning 11 European, World, Commonwealth and Olympic titles. He did the triple-double at worlds (2015, 2017, 2019), the quadruple-double at Europeans (2014, 2016, 2018, 2021) and backed up his Rio gold in Tokyo; the first British swimmer to retain an Olympic title.

There was also a paradigm shift in the very stroke in which he was so dominant during this period. So far ahead of the rest of the world, the only way to catch up was to emulate. Peaty’s stroke, unique when he burst onto the scene, is now far more common.

Staying lower in the water than others, with a phenomenal amount of power in both his armstroke and recovery, it was the kick that was most revolutionary. The narrow, whip-like kick he pioneered is now ubiquitous among sprinters, but no one can quite match the propulsion he could generate.

A Class Apart

Arno Kamminga was the man who ran Peaty closest during this time, only 0.63 seconds back in the Tokyo Olympic final 57.37 to 58.00, but even there he never looked uncomfortable. Fellow Brit James Wilby was the main competitor prior to 2020, taking second behind him at Commonwealths and Europeans in 2018 and Worlds in 2019, hitting times of 58.6 and 58.4.

The constant however was that no-one truly challenged Peaty. He broke the 58-second barrier 13 times between 2016 and 2019, whereas there were only three swims under 58.5 from anyone else, all in 2019. The smallest gap between himself and the world #2 in that period was 1.17 seconds in 2017, greater than the margin in any year other than 2006 and 1974 in the preceding 50 years.

Largest intra-year margin from world#1 to world #2

1. Hencken to Pankin (1974) – 1.75 seconds
2. Peaty to Van der Burgh (2016) – 1.56 seconds
3. Peaty to Wilby (2018) – 1.54 seconds
4. Peaty to Shymanovich (2019)- 1.41 seconds
5. Hansen to Rickard (2006) – 1.26 seconds
6. Peaty to Cordes (2017) – 1.17 seconds
7. Morken to Lalle (1977) – 0.95 seconds
8. Lundquist to Winchell (1979) – 0.94 seconds
9. Moorhouse to Volkov (1990) – 0.93 seconds
10. Hansen to Kitajima (2004) – 0.73 seconds

Those are also the only two non-Peaty years where the gap has been over a second – remember that he was that far ahead four years in a row. Think of a 100 breaststroke final in this period and the overwhelming image will be Peaty a body length in front of the field, a broken cavalry charge as expected as it was ominous.

Adam Peaty sprints away from Arno Kamminga in 2018 en route to setting a new World Record of 57.10 – courtesy of Giusy Cisale swimswam.com

You could see 2021 as a slight downshift from the heady heights of 2018 and 2019. His best time was merely a 57.37 from the Tokyo final (albeit in the morning), his slowest winning time since 2017. However, he broke 58 seconds seven times, the slowest of which was 57.70; a hundredth behind all-time #2 Qin Haiyang‘s best.

The lack of jeopardy is what stands out in the first few years since that maiden World Record in 2015. Kamminga and Wilby were the only swimmers between 2016 and 2021 to be within a second of Peaty in an international final, and ironically both of them had worse starts than him on those occasions. He was first to the wall every time.

The foot injury that dogged him in 2022 robbed us of an historic four-peat at that summer’s World Championship, and had clearly affected his stroke. The Commonwealth final in August, where he fell to fourth in the final 25, was his first defeat in the event in eight years and came in a part of the race that was usually where turned the screw.

He’d been 58.58 earlier that year at British trials, good enough for silver at worlds and to take gold in Birmingham, but wouldn’t break 59 seconds for another two years. A year’s break in 2023 was to set him up for Paris in 2024 where he took silver, an agonising 0.02 away from becoming only the second male swimmer to three-peat an event. There is no surprise about the first.

A Longstanding Legacy

It’s easy to forget that he was the fastest swimmer in the world last year with yet another 57-point swim at British trials, his 21st. The inclusion of the stroke 50’s in LA 2028 will see a remarkable career extended three more years, although he has taken 2025 off competing and is no guarantee to be back next year.

Regardless he’s shown a level of longevity and competitiveness no one other than Brendan Hansen has been able to hold a candle to since the turn of the century.

Not since John Hencken back in the 1970’s has a single swimmer had an unbroken streak of world records like Peaty. In fact, only Hencken and Chet Jastremski have ever set five consecutive World Records in the event, Peaty being the only non-American to do so.

In Hencken’s case his final record lasted a single year before being broken by Gerald Morken. Peaty’s 56.88 is now going on six years, with only two other men having been within a second of that time. Just like Biedermann’s 200 freestyle or or Peirsol’s 200 backstroke, his 100 breaststroke will almost certainly be one of swimming’s white whales.