Supercharged GOAT-level swim‑genius Adam Ramsay-Peaty is the Messi of breaststroke | Barney Ronay

The wider story is that Ramsay-Peaty is one big step closer to competing at a fourth Olympic Games in Los Angeles, having almost quit the sport before and also after Paris. He’s a bit like this, one of those athletes who seems simultaneously hyper-committed and on the verge of walking away, like Ronnie O’Sullivan yawning and doing the ironing at the world championship final then reeling off a 147 with his left foot.

Personally I really want him to be there. In part because he was second by a hair in the 100m in Paris, then tested positive for coronavirus, which is no way for the GOAT to go out. But also to bring his very moreish kind of heat.

“The next two years are probably going to be the hardest of my career,” he said this week, and you wanted to punch the air and leap around like a NuMetal frontman, because he needs to say things like this. Ramsay-Peaty is one of those guys who just lives the grind, the pain, the fear. In fact he’s one better than a breaststroke genius. He’s a tortured breaststroke genius.

Nothing wrong with that. It’s better than being tortured and not very good at anything, which is most of us. But it is also an unusual thing to be a tortured genius at, bobbing along out there ahead of the human race, alone with his clock, existentially heroic. But also, and this is unavoidable, doing breaststroke.

Adam Ramsay-Peaty has been a fixture in the gossip columns since starting a relationship with Holly Ramsay, daughter of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. Photograph: Tim Williams/Action Plus/Shutterstock

This is an odd event. Most disciplines of this type replicate some form of military display, or at least a useful physical attribute. The hurdles: yes. Humans jump over stuff. The triple jump? Not so much. You need to leap a fast running stream? You’re not going to triple-jump it. The breaststroke is bordering on this. You’re in the water in Jaws, gasping, shouting, Nemesis closing in. Chief Brody isn’t breaststroking towards the shore.

Useless he’s being played by Adam Ramsay-Peaty, who is perfectly adapted to this set of physical movements: the unusually large feet and hands, the double-jointed elbows, the basic way his body works. He is the breaststroke, an all-time genius in an event that basically exists by accident, like being really good at running backwards in a zig-zag. Best of all, he’s a normal kind of likable and fascinating bloke who just happens to have abnormal talent. Famously he was so afraid of water as a child his family would apologise to the neighbours for all the shouting at bath-time. He went to his first swimming lesson aged four and was so-so at it until the lightbulb moment where he switched to breaststroke.

He had a regular adolescence, noticed people he’d swum up with excelling at London 2012, then got serious. Rio 2016 made him. He won 100m gold and broke the world record. Since then it has been a mix of glide, grace, brilliance and what he describes as “an incredibly lonely journey”.

Seven thousand calories a day bookended by a 16-hour fast. Obsessive training (“The sword is most deadly when it’s sharp”). Gladiator mindset. Self-loathing in victory. Ramsay-Peaty is also a survivor, menaced at times by addiction and depression. “The devil on my shoulder says: ‘You’re missing out on life, you’re not good enough, you need a drink, you can’t have what you want, you can’t be happy,’” he has said. You don’t have to be a supercharged all-time swim-genius to feel any of this.

The other thing with late, GOAT-level Ramsay-Peaty, he really should be massively famous. He’s brilliant, charismatic, relatable. But he’s also a victim of the decline of minority sports. He’s a victim of algorithm life, of our unceasing mono-culture, the noise that drowns everything out.

Adam Peaty was so close to a third successive individual gold when he raced in the Paris Olympics, even though he later found out he had coronavirus. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

Previously we consumed our athletes centrally. In those times Ramsay-Peaty would have been a Lester Piggott, a Duncan Goodhew, a Daley Thompson. These days football will swallow all the air in the room. Noni Madueke, for example, is quite a good player at elite level. He’s also mend-bendingly rich and has nearly two million Instagram followers. Adam Ramsay-Peaty is the unchallenged GOAT in an all-consuming discipline. Few people would even recognise him.

There is an oddity here. Celebrity has come for Ramsay-Peaty from a different angle, one that also seems to mock the Spartan deprivations of elite sport. Last year he married the daughter of A-list aura-dad Gordon Ramsay, and is now a regular in the gossip sidebars, the putting-on-a-leggy-display zone.

His wedding was massive in the tabloids, in part because, sadly, his own family was almost entirely absent. It is to be hoped his new family brings him happiness, and that he can be reconciled with his old one, too. Who knows, maybe he can also become a niche genius at making in-laws get on, although, again, this would be pushing human capacities to previously unseen limits.

Either way I’m desperate to see him in Los Angeles, that bobbing head still parting the waters, our own niche, oddly everyday racehorse genius.