The swim world is still recovering from Cameron McEvoy’s 21.27 in the 50-meter freestyle during the 2023 Australian World Championship Trials on Sunday morning. It was his first personal best in the 50 free in seven years, vaulting him atop the global rankings this season at 29 years old while becoming the quickest in the world since the Tokyo Olympics, the second-fastest Australian, and the 10th-fastest performer ever. We were left with a single question: How?
McEvoy didn’t race all of 2022 and has remained relatively quiet about his comeback, aside from a nine-minute video feature released last week by his Queensland Academy of Sport (QAS) team. The wide-ranging interview covered how he was thankful for the COVID-19 pandemic because of how burnt out he was with training, his year away from the sport following the Tokyo Olympics two summers ago, and his newfound love of rock climbing that helped inspire his alternative approach to strength and conditioning.
McEvoy began by sharing how he only had a three-week break from training every year from age 9 up until March of 2020, when COVID-19 restrictions started. After 18 years in a row swimming 30 to 70 kilometers a week, he was “secretly excited” that everything shut down.
“I was pretty severely burnt out for a number of reasons, one of them being the repetition of the same seasonal approach year in year out, doing the same type of sessions and virtually getting the same type of results,” McEvoy recalled. “So basically what I did was spent three months doing absolutely nothing, kind of got bored of that eventually. I thought to myself, ‘I’ve been athlete for about 20 years, I’ve done gym, I’ve done swimming, but I’ve never done strength training properly’ — in the sense where every time I’ve done gym, I’ve had such a giant aerobic load that it just zaps any strength gains. So I’ve never really seen the full benefits of that.”
So McEvoy started hitting his local gym six times a week to see how much he could lift and how much weight he could put on. He went from 72 kilos to 81 within a couple months, but he had no performance aspects in mind. In his head, he was done with swimming and ready to move on. That is, until, his training partner set a pool record in training with a dive 50 freestyle and inspired McEvoy to try his hand at the challenge. Without having logged a stroke in the previous seven months, he beat his friend’s time and went faster than the times he was doing in the middle of Olympic preparation.
McEvoy slowly got his feet back in the water and resumed training in January of 2021. But he rushed into training in order to participate at the postponed Tokyo Olympics later that summer, so he didn’t quite get the break he desired. So after returning home from his third Olympics, he decided to take the entire next year off from the sport.
“In that year off post-Tokyo, it was the first time in my life that I was free to do basically whatever I wanted,” McEvoy said. “Didn’t have a swimming schedule, didn’t have commitments in the swimming world, so to speak.”
McEvoy toured around Europe and Australia, renting an RV to drive down the eastern coast toward Sydney, where he and his girlfriend ended up living for eight months. There, he took up a new hobby that helped refocus his swimming goals.
“I got really deep into rock climbing,” McEvoy said. “I did a ton of bouldering. I probably went five times a week, two to four hours a session. The level of strength that they could exert relative to what I had ever been exposed to, it opened my mind to what the possibilities could be for transferring whatever I could develop into the water.
“Especially off the back of the exposure I had to better strength at the end of 2020, a different training approach, and what could be the potential of that,” he added. “Everything was referenced back to: How can this improve my particular events in swimming?”
He reportedly bulked up to 92 kilograms at his heaviest before returning to competition at December’s Queensland State Championships at 85 kilograms. After that meet, he said “if the body holds up in terms of injuries, I’ve got maybe a good decade or so in the sport given that there’s guys who are in their late 30s (and still achieving amazing things).”
McEvoy credited the QAS strength and conditioning staff as well as Somerville House coach Tim Lane for embracing his different approach to training.
“Within four weeks of being here (at QAS), my time from a dive to 15 meters reduced by .4 seconds, which is wild in terms of an overall time for 50 meters let alone 15 meters,” McEvoy said. “It’s a massive support network that I’ve actually never had exposure to in my swimming career.
“But I’m saying that, I’ve been working very closely with Tim Lane, he moved up over a year ago to Somerville Aquatics,” he added. “They have welcomed me with open arms and provided a really nice training environment there. Tim’s own expertise in both his own swimming experience as a swimmer and as a coach in the college NCAA system in the states (at Notre Dame). And particularly the type of training he was exposed to over there, which was I guess different from the general approach — a lot of resistance training, a lot of experience and practice in the different approaches with that too.”
If McEvoy can bring home a medal in the 50 free at next month’s World Championships in Fukuoka, Japan, he would be the first Australian man to do so since Michael Klim in 1998.
As for his long-term goals, he said his aim for the Paris 2024 Olympics as simply being as fast as he can in the 50 and 100 freestyles in addition to being a “valuable asset” for the Aussie 4×100 free relay team.
“We have insane depth in that event, and to be a part of that not only would be amazing to be in that team environment but also to be part of a team that has the potential to go forth and win a gold medal in that event,” he said of the 4×100 free relay. “So effectively everything we’re doing as a team is just trying to optimize that when that time comes.”
Is exactly how I also went from 165lb—>200 lb at his same height over about a decade by switching swimming for rugby/weights.
Very natural, excited to see a new podium contender! This summer we might see a 21.3 NOT medal for the first time since 2009!!!
I have to admit, after seeing that 21.27 and reading that he’d put on 19 kilos, my first thought was, of course, that McEvoy had gone over to the dark side (steroids). But after reading this article, listening to him calmly describe how he did it, and watching the short video of him rock climbing, it all seems much more plausible. And his body has none of the usual steroid signatures (humped trapezius muscles, convex deltoids tapering down to a sharp point, a well-defined line between the pecs extending all the way up to the collarbones, abnormally well-defined external obliques, and visible veins on the fronts of the shoulders, among other things). Rather, he has the look, and even the… Read more »
The real question is what is his bouldering/top rope grade 👀
If he drops another tenth at worlds, people should be on world record watch for this guy
Wonderful video; great self-knowledge insights. Cam seems to have his head screwed on right. I’ll be cheering for him this summer and in Paris.
(Also: no gaudy tattoos!)
Hmmm, it’s almost like you don’t need to log weekly mileage that is in the range of 500x longer than the event that you are training for…
Personally, I don’t know why sprinters would ever need to log big aerobic workouts. Why not just do a set of 20x50s on short-ish rest 1-2 times per week? Minimum effective dose is very much a vital concept here.
Generally sprinters needs also aerobic training because it helps them to be better at the specific training.
Let’s say that you do the 20×50 that you’ve talked about, someone with a better aerobic capacity would be able to do it faster more often. You can also do something like ? x50m at 200m pace (you continue as long as you can hold the pace). If your have enough endurance you will be able to substation the effort longer so you will accumulate more intense training over the months and years.
I’m not saying that the sprinters should train like the distance swimmers but there is a value in training slower than you race pace
Yeah, of course there is value in it. It’s too taxing to spend a ton of your training at or near race pace, but it’s also not efficient in terms of muscle wastage to do 2 hour aerobic workouts – which is why I suggested that aerobic sets that take 15-30minutes are probably a better use of a sprinter’s time. This gives the benefits of some aerobic conditioning, but not excessive enough to change the athlete’s body composition significantly away from that of a sprinter.
I also want to acknowledge your comment that “someone with better aerobic capacity will be able to do the set faster, more often”. That’s kind of beside the point – the sprinter who is better… Read more »
I KNEW IT.
Just getting super jacked works, folks.
And to hell with technique.
The Michael Andrew plan: no technique + no weights.
McEvoy does have phenomenal technique though. That 47.04 is an incredible swim to watch.
The principal behind USRPT is overloading. So it really is surprising that MA doesn’t lift.
Don’t understand the point of this post – Cam’s focus on the minutiae of technique, leaning into his physics background has been well documented online
I knew I should have included “WARNING: SARCASM!” in that post. But it’s too late now.
Honestly yeah, there’s a point of diminishing returns with being a scrawny teen going 47.0.
Once you’re already that good, no real other way to shave 0.4 off your 15m time other than getting swole as hell.
Are you the Chlorine Daddy Whisperer?
I don’t think getting swole will come with a straightforward drop of time. The 0.4 in the first 15m won by getting jacked might come back to bite you in the behind on the second 50’s lactic build-up.
There is a pattern with scrawny swimmers who aren’t fast while scrawny getting fast after getting jacked (see: Dressel), and scrawny swimmers who are fast while scrawny slowing down after getting jacked.
He’s done so much pool training that he needed something else.
Great that he figured out a new way of training and then got some very good results.
He still loves the sport and wants to keep competing at the highest level. He mentioned that 4×100 free relay, which could use another 46 split besides King Kyle.