Olden goldie McEvoy may swim on to 2032 Olympics

Cam McEvoy is about to release his secrets, believing they can propel him to swim at his home Brisbane Olympics as a 38-year-old.

McEvoy, aged 30, is Australia’s oldest Olympic swimming gold medalist with his dazzling dash delivering victory in the men’s 50m freestyle in Paris.

His Friday night feat justifies McEvoy’s gamble to re-write the training manual for the freestyle sprint.

Until the Paris Games, he’d kept most chapters closed, not wanting to offer his rivals insight to his revolutionary methods.

Now, he’s an open book.

“We have been inundated with questions and interest,” McEvoy said.

“And I think it will go a long way not only for athletes who are high performing but for the amount of ex-swimmers who quit when they’re 16, 17, because they just didn’t like the kilometers or they had injuries. “

McEvoy took a hiatus from swimming after his third Olympics in Tokyo three years ago.

He wasn’t sure he’d return until he visited Paris in 2022 to attend the wedding of the sister of his girlfriend Maddie.

They drove past the Paris La Defense Arena, built as the home stadium of rugby union club Racing 92 and transformed into Europe’s largest indoor arena.

McEvoy knew it was where a drop-in pool would be placed for the Olympics.

And he knew, at that drive-by moment, he wanted to swim again.

“That was the day that I went all in,” McEvoy said.

All in meant ditching traditional training for the sprint freestyles which McEvoy experienced since his Olympic debut in London a dozen years ago.

McEvoy is nicknamed The Professor – he studies physics and mathematics, wants to be an astronaut, and has previously raced with what most thought were sound waves emblazoned on his swim cap.

In fact, they were gravitational waves in a nod to Einstein’s general theory of relativity which, in part and in layman terms, covers the stretching and contraction of space-time.

McEvoy returned to the pool, shunning age-old methods in favor of a new-age hunch: there was a better way.

“I always knew there was potentially another way to do things for sprint freestyle,” he said.

“I’ll do it. If it didn’t work, the closure is right there.

“And if it worked, I could be better. And then I can get closure coming back as well.

“There were training sessions where you second-guess it, you’re in the pits and things aren’t feeling too great.

“But the amount of times that happened, it was 10-fold the amount of times where I thought ‘this is special’.”

Endless kilometers staring at the black line on the bottom of a pool were replaced by rock climbing and calisthenics among other left-field activities.

“It’s hard to explain the two-year process that it took to get here and the route I took,” he said.

“That act of creation, effectively, over the last two years…being the guinea pig and seeing where it would take me, is something that I’m going to be most proud of.”

McEvoy released teasers about his training before Paris. Now, he’ll detail the entire big bang.

And swimming at the Brisbane Olympics as a 38-year-old?

“If the motivation is there and the body is holding up, I don’t see why not,” he said.