Chad Le Clos: Olympic star with ambition to be swimming’s answer to Cristiano Ronaldo

Ahead of a trip to Abu Dhabi, Chad le Clos talks to Osman Samiuddin about his goal of becoming the best swimmer on the planet.

Chad Le Clos's breakout moment as the South African, left, edges American Michael Phelps to win the 200m butterfly gold medal at the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Patrick B. Kraemer / EPA

The successful South African athlete is a slightly scary species. Think back to the best, the likes of Francois Pienaar, Graeme Smith and Oscar Pistorius – pre-fall – and remember their supreme self-belief and confidence.

At so many moments on the field it felt as if these guys were born a little too ready, that they were a little too good and, above all, they were a little too focused. It is that focus, the focus of the champion, that elevated them.

It is an overwhelming focus in which all resources are committed to a single cause. To the ordinary mortal, the uber-motivation to reach that level is not only unimaginable, but a little eerie.

Sample this routine of Chad Le Clos who will, it is easy to predict, end up in the company of South Africa’s greatest athletes. Barring great misfortune, he might end up among the greatest from anywhere.

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“A typical day for me would be waking up around 5.30am and heading over to practice,” he says and even at that stage it sounds exhausting. “We start practice at around 6.30am, until about 9, and then I come home.

“I then have some steak and then a little rest in the afternoon and go training from about 2.30pm to 5.15pm. Then, depending on alternative days, I have a gym session or core session three times a week. The other days, I have a massage or chill at home.”

He takes Sundays off, but at least once a month he also trains on a Sunday. In total he does more than 20 hours swimming a week. Pre-season begins in January and is intense. After that the intensity varies until the off-season, which is the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

“A pretty intense programme, yeah,” he says.

It is precisely the kind of programme – adhered to strictly since he was 14 – that has produced the results that led to the International Swimming Federation (Fina) naming him Swimmer of the Year for 2014.

Le Clos won two gold medals at the Commonwealth Games and seven overall. During the Fina world swimming championships in Doha in December, he became the first swimmer to win the 50 metres, 100m and 200m butterfly events.

That, including a 200m freestyle gold, brought him the biggest medal haul by a South African at the event. He won, staggeringly, each of the 27 races of swimming’s World Cup series.

He is swimming’s big cheese this year, the boy who beat the greatest, Michael Phelps, the boy who may take over from Phelps as swimming’s main man.

He concedes to having days when the ordinariness of the human mind trips him up and training is a chore.

“At least once a week and many days through the year like those. But that’s when your true character comes out, you stand up and be counted.

“Everyone can train hard when they are feeling good. But it’s the days when you’re feeling bad that you have to step up. That’s when champions step up. They pull through.”

Le Clos does not turn 23 until April, in case you are wondering at the polished savviness of those words. He is just so adult. A little later he quotes a Gary Player line on how hard practice is itself the best kind of mental preparation for the big events.

“In many ways I can compare that to me,” and it does not sound audacious that he would think of putting Player and himself in the same thought bubble.

It is easy to imagine him being like this from birth, or at least from when he decided to become serious about swimming. Until then, football had preoccupied his mind and body as much, but once swimming became the focus, there was never any doubt he would not make it.

The breakthrough came at the London Olympics in 2012, when he beat Phelps to win the 200m butterfly gold. Chances are the wider world beyond swimming may not remember the race so well, but who can forget his father Bert’s instant, wonderfully unrestrained reaction to the win? It was an immortal sort of sporting moment.

It might still be too early, but Le Clos’s early successes and the perception of swimming as a sport with swift, early burnout, leads naturally to one question. How long does he want to stick around? How much more does he want?

The perception may not be entirely valid, but the cases of Phelps and Ian Thorpe, both of whom retired early (only to return) speaks of a reaction to the monastic discipline elite swimmers inflict upon themselves, a kind of inward collapse of a meticulous regime.

“The thing is you get into a sport really young, you train for lots of hours when all your friends are having fun as a young boy and especially through the teen years,” he says.

“When you get to 28, 29 you still feel like a kid and you want to go out and enjoy life still.

“Also the motivation factor dies out a bit. You get older, you don’t want to get up that early in the morning, do those really gruelling hours of workouts.

“There are swimmers who stay the course in their 30s and credit to them. Hopefully, I can be like that and continue my career well into my 30s.”

Despite all he has won, despite the peak year he has had, the motivation remains. Of course it does – that unrelenting ambition is the hallmark of the great South African athlete.

It is the hallmark of any great athlete, including his sporting hero – Cristiano Ronaldo, another athlete whose ambition and dedication is unhuman.

“There are things I still want to achieve. I want to be the most successful Olympian South Africa and Africa has had. I want to win as many golds as I can at the world championships this year.

“I want to set myself as a real legend in the sport, like Phelps and Mark Spitz are remembered worldwide. I want people to say, like they say of Ronaldo that he is the best soccer player in the world, I want them to say Chad Le Clos is the best swimmer in the world.”

It is difficult to doubt that one day they will.

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