When Alex Yee claimed Olympic Games triathlon gold in spectacular fashion at Paris 2024, it was the culmination of a two-year project.
The 26-year-old Londoner was simply sensational in the French capital on July 31 as he ran down New Zealand’s Hayden Wilde in the closing stages for an incredible victory.
It was a moment which Yee had dreamed off since 2021, when he sat down to map out what the road to Paris 2024 would look like. With the goal being to make him better in every way.
Silver in Tokyo in 2021 behind the brilliant Kristian Blummenfelt may have been something of a surprise, but now future gold was clearly a possibility. Yee looked at everything he would need to do, and one of the key areas was to improve his swim – in the past a perceived weakness.
How did Alex Yee solve the swim?
“I sat down with my coach at the end of the 2021 year and we labelled what it would look like to be the ideal athlete, the ideal person. What that looked like in terms of physiology, lifestyle, how I treated everything.”
Yee was famed for winning races with his brilliant run ability, but he knew that improving in the water would make that deadly weapon even more effective. He also knew it would not be easy.
Speaking in a newly-released video interview with World Triathlon (watch the full version at the foot of this page), he said: “Yeah a long, painful process. Just so incredibly lucky to have people who are patient around me who were willing to invest. I train with an amazing group in Loughborough as well who are full of young guys who are hungry, who are willing to take your place, but also work with you and work hard.
“And that’s what you want to train with. You want to train with guys who keep you humble, who probably humble me every day in the pool. So I think I’m always chasing and that’s where I want to be in training. And so I can. You go to the race course and feel competitive and feel in a good spot.
“And I was lucky enough to be coached by some of the British Swimming biomechanists who helped me reconstruct my stroke completely for the demands of the Paris course. We knew it was going to be a really strong downstream swim and that meant I need to have a more hydrodynamic stroke.
“And yeah, I guess that was a long two-year process, but to be honest, for most of those two years, I was a much worse swimmer than I was before, but it taught me to swim well. And now that lifts my ceiling of where my swimming can go. And even in Weihai [the most recent WTCS race, won brilliantly by Yee], you can see that there’s hopefully a bit of potential there and a bit of light at the end of the tunnel for my swimming.”
Open water as well as pool
As well as those British biomechanists, Yee also teamed up with an open water specialist to give him that all-round expertise in raising his swim game.
“We’ve also been working with Phil Clayton as well, who’s an open water specialist. So it was the perfect combination of the two – having an amazing pool biomechanist who’s used to people who swim miles quicker than I do. So. For her to come back to my level, I think she found there was a lot that could be changed.
“And that’s quite an exciting place to be, gave me that project and something to work towards every day to think about every length of the pool that I was doing hours on that black line. But yeah, I think also combining that with training with Phil out in Australia and having those long-term camps at the start of the year, setting up.
“First of all, having the stroke, which I’ve developed in the pool over the winter and then through the summer, but then applying it to open water seemed to be a bit of a magic formula for me to, to be able to come off that and be like, yeah, I feel like I’m able to deliver some, some good swims at races.”
Plan comes together at Paris 2024
That two-year plan, which brought much doubt and so many tough moments, came together when it really mattered on July 31 in the French capital. Yee was never out of the front pack, and it set him up for that famous final surge to gold.
“Definitely the first lap was better than I expected. I think I came out even 9th or 10th out of the first lap and thought, wow, this is a totally new experience for me. And that was one of those moments where I’d been going through this two-year project of trying to swim the best I could.
“Sometimes it felt like it was clicking, but most of the time it really felt a million miles away. And then we’ve always said, it doesn’t matter how things go until the 30th of July or the 31st of July.
“And yeah, it was that moment where I was like, okay, this is… it sounded mad at the time, but it’s actually, it’s actually working out quite well. So, yeah, that was really special to have that, that small moment during the race. But yeah, it was definitely much better than I imagined it would be.”
