Coaches were once death-riding McEvoy behind his back. Look who’s laughing now

Four years ago, a number of Australian swimming coaches were criticising Cam McEvoy behind his back. Death-riding him, you could say.

His radical new approach to training after a long lay-off from the pool, they said, could never work. Not if he wanted to become the fastest in the world through water.

Having bypassed the 2022 Commonwealth Games after effectively walking away from the sport a year earlier, a decade after his maiden Olympic campaign at London 2012, McEvoy was viewed as yesterday’s man.

At 28, the three-time Olympian knew that many in the swimming fraternity believed his time at the top had passed. He would forever be remembered as the guy who bombed out to finish seventh in the final of the men’s 100m freestyle final at the 2016 Rio Olympics.

McEvoy’s world ranking in the 50m freestyle was average. He was 40th in the world in 2020, 51st in 2021 and 38th at the end of 2022 when he got back in the pool.

Look at him now.

World champion. Olympic gold medallist. And, perhaps the title he wanted most, world record holder.

“Don’t worry,” McEvoy says with a smile. “The world is slowly catching on.”

Like many Olympic athletes, swimmers tend to operate in four-year cycles.

McEvoy’s remarkable comeback has also been over a four-year cycle, but it has been a Commonwealth Games cycle instead.

His journey from 2022 to 2026 ranks among the greatest four-year stretches by an Australian swimmer. As he wrote on Instagram in late 2021 ahead of his reinvention as a swimmer: “Continuing to jump on the same conveyor belt year after year stagnates and rots the soul via boredom.”

The 32-year-old arrives at next week’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow with very little to prove as Australia’s only able-bodied individual swimming world record holder after Kaylee McKeown’s withdrawal due to glandular fever.

McEvoy will start a hot favourite in the men’s 50m freestyle, an event he has dominated since winning a world title in 2023. Fellow Australian Jamie Jack appears his biggest threat.

Jack has spent recent weeks training alongside McEvoy, after being invited in by the veteran himself. McEvoy has become increasingly willing to share the methods that transformed his career — an openness many elite sprinters would never contemplate with a rival.

This is also the last major individual title missing from McEvoy’s resume. He finished just shy of individual gold at the 2014 (Glasgow) and 2018 (Gold Coast) Commonwealth Games before spending 2022 in the swimming wilderness.

“I was extremely satisfied in 2014 in Glasgow last time,” McEvoy said. “That was my first time getting any sort of individual medal on the international stage. I could not be disappointed with that, especially when I was 19.”

Victory this time in Glasgow would represent another emphatic response to those who doubted his decision to abandon conventional training and embrace a less-is-more philosophy.

“I had a huge chip on my shoulder, particularly in 2021 and 2022,” McEvoy said. “There were a lot of people, even before I decided to come back and do something different, who were quite vocal around how my career ended up towards the latter parts of 2021.

“It’s been extremely satisfying to not only come back doing an entirely different training method that I was vocal about wanting to do prior to this - and they shut it down - but also basically checking off the list everything you can in the sport.”

Conventional wisdom suggested that without a big aerobic base — something achieved by churning out endless kilometres in the pool — McEvoy could never again swim genuinely world-class times, even if he began focusing on the 50m freestyle event and ditching the 100m distance.

The aerobic foundation was already there. But rock climbing - to begin with - resistance training and an obsessive focus on biomechanics, aided by a special starting block, offered something no other elite sprinter was pursuing.

Four years ago, on the recommendation of former Australian representative Bobby Hurley, McEvoy met coach Tim Lane at a hotel near Sydney Airport.

The pair clicked immediately and mapped out a plan that culminated in world titles in 2023 and 2025, either side of stunning Olympic gold in Paris, where McEvoy became the first Australian man to win the one-lap event in the pool.

Coincidentally, it was at that same hotel the Dolphins gathered after last month’s trials in Sydney to begin planning their Commonwealth Games campaign, with McEvoy now one of the team’s unofficial leaders.

Some coaches remain sceptical. Others have quietly changed their tune.

“Despite a lot of coaches who are still vocally against what I’m doing - I’m definitely noticing a lot of them - some are trying to integrate little bits and pieces into their own training, which is funny,” McEvoy said.

“There was a 50-year-old who broke Susie O’Neill’s masters record by doing my type of training, and she only started it this year.

“If you want to do 50-metre events, you have to do this type of thing eventually. Otherwise, you’re just going to be left in no man’s land.”

Dolphins coach Rohan Taylor has been a big supporter of McEvoy’s tailored approach.

“I think Cam’s the trend at the moment with his training, but others are trying to copy it,” Taylor said.

“It’ll be interesting to see if someone can take a young person and bring them through that way.”

One of McEvoy’s biggest rivals, Britain’s Ben Proud, who finished runner-up behind the Australian at both the Paris Olympics and recent world championships in Singapore, won’t be at the Commonwealth Games after defecting to the Enhanced Games.

It was here where Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev “lowered” McEvoy’s world record of 20.88 to 20.81 seconds, after taking performance-enhancing drugs and wearing a banned swimming suit.

McEvoy has given little thought to the Enhanced Games since its inaugural event in May in Las Vegas but would dearly love to break that mark in Glasgow to prove a point. His time of 21.32 at Australia’s trials was enough to get him on the team but an unofficial 25m freestyle world record in recent weeks has the four-time Olympian primed for glory.

“I’d like to do my best over there and hopefully come home with a gold,” McEvoy said.

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