Olympian Lewis Clareburt measures his life in split seconds. That’s what all swimming world champions off to the Olympic Games in Paris do, day in and day out.
Since Clareburt won two gold medals at the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games, one a Commonwealth record, he has continued to shine. In February, he unexpectedly won the 400m individual medley at the 2024 World Aquatics Championships in Doha, qualifying him for his second Olympics. The 400m medley – 100m each of butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle – is his favoured event.
Clareburt, 25, is the only swimmer to hold both Commonwealth Games and world championship titles heading into Paris and the only New Zealand swimmer ever to hold both titles simultaneously.
In April, he swam what was then the fastest time in the world this year at the Sydney Open, 4:08.71, to take the world No 1 ranking, which has since gone to American Carson Foster. Clareburt’s time was just 0.01 seconds off his best.
“That’s crazy,” he says. “I spend my whole day trying to figure out how I am going to get that little bit faster. We work on the smallest of margins every single day for it to hopefully add up to greater value.”
By greater value, he means not just a world championship gold, but an Olympics one. Just four Kiwis have won an individual Olympics swimming medal of any colour – Jean Stewart (bronze) in Helsinki in 1952, Paul Kingsman and Anthony Mosse (both bronze) in Seoul in 1988, and Danyon Loader, a silver in Barcelona in 1992 and twin gold medals at Atlanta in 1996.
Clareburt hopes that shaving more time off his 4:08.70 Commonwealth record in the 400m medley final in Paris on July 28 will get him on the podium. “It will be awesome to be able to podium in Paris, right? It’s why I do swimming. I want to be able to podium.
“Ultimately, I want to be able to podium with a world record and a gold medal around my neck. Dreams are free sometimes, but that’s the aim.”
Goodbye to Hollywood
But getting to this point meant changing coaches and home towns within months of the games. He spends 20 hours each week in the 50m pool at the country’s high performance training centre on Auckland’s North Shore, coached by 31-year-old Mitch Nairn, the youngest coach in the Kiwi contingent heading to Paris.
But Clareburt’s heart is in Wellington, where, from age 8, he trained in a Wellington City Council pool. He was forced to move to Auckland late last year after a dispute over lane availability at the pool, where staff would often cancel his Swimming New Zealand-funded lane hire bookings at short notice, he says. Council staff also placed restrictions around Clareburt’s use of camera equipment to aid his training. Immensely frustrated, he was losing confidence.
Gary Hollywood, his coach since 2016, was exasperated, as the Olympics were less than a year away.
“I was like, ‘I can’t keep this up. This isn’t sustainable being in this situation’ where I was constantly fighting just to be able to swim,” Clareburt says.
The bachelor of commerce student at Victoria University of Wellington knew he had to put his studies on hold and move. Hollywood’s family commitments meant Clareburt had to split with his long-time trainer.
Kingsman, whose 1988 bronze was for backstroke, was disappointed that such a highly ranked swimmer had to battle for pool space. “In Australia, and most other countries, local city councils would take pride in supporting their top local athlete, generating positive publicity and giving themselves a ‘win’ for doing it.”
Clareburt is happier in Auckland. As a swimmer, Nairn was briefly coached by Hollywood, one of only three coaches to have helped New Zealand swimmers into two Olympic finals in the same year, including Clareburt on debut at Tokyo in 2021, where he finished seventh in the 400m medley and eighth in the 200m medley.
Since Tokyo, Clareburt has dreamed of being our next Olympic swimming medallist. A few years ago, he would not have dreamed he would be a world champion, even though that Paris podium has always been the goal. Now he is ranked world No 2.
“I never thought I’d be in that position. It’s always been a dream, not a reality.”
His Doha swim was New Zealand’s second only title at a world championships. He did not expect to win; he was initially seeded fifth. Had he placed outside the medals, he would not have qualified for Paris.
“I was surprised. I knew I was going to do a decent time, but the competition was more about finding my confidence back in swimming and how the new training has been going. It was a pretty cool feeling.”
Now, Clareburt’s confidence is back to post-Birmingham 2022 levels and his Olympics preparation is on track. “It just made me back myself again. I just used to go into races and not give a shit about who was in it, just know that I was good enough. I had lost that over the last couple of years.”
He’s certainly good enough. His Sydney time remains second fastest in the world this year but mere split seconds separate him and a clutch of contenders from the US, UK, Italy, France and Japan.
The world record is held by Frenchman Léon Marchand, whose time of 4:02.50 at the world championships in Fukuoka last year is more than six seconds quicker than Clareburt’s Sydney effort.
Clareburt trained with Marchand and his top US coach Bob Bowman in Arizona for a month in January. “Arizona was an exciting opportunity for Lewis to see what the best are doing and how he can be better and what he can bring back to New Zealand to work on,” Nairn says.
Moss Burmester, who placed fourth in the 200m butterfly at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, says mixing with the world’s best “changes your view of things”.
Burmester trained briefly with Bowman before competing in Beijing. “When I heard that Lewis was training with Bob Bowman, I was stoked,” Burmester says. “I thought that it was the best thing that he could do.”
Burmester believes Clareburt can win an Olympics gold. “Lewis is swimming personal best times at major meets almost every time – a lot of people don’t.”
‘I wish I had shaved’
Clareburt says he would have preferred to better his Commonwealth Games-winning time in Sydney in April. “Yeah, I’m gutted I didn’t shave. But it’s nice knowing that you can do these times. I wish I had shaved, because I could have got the record again. It would be nice going into the Olympics with a recent personal best. It did give me more confidence, knowing I’m in a pretty good place.”
His Sydney time nevertheless sets him up nicely for Paris, where he hopes to go even quicker with a full taper. A taper is when swimmers decrease training volume and increase rest to swim optimally and hopefully do a lifetime best. Nairn reckons Clareburt can swim three seconds faster than his lifetime best.
“Why not?” Clareburt says.
At Paris, he will swim the same three events – the 400m and 200m individual medley and 200m butterfly – he medalled in at Birmingham.
Home away from home
Clareburt lived in the Wellington waterfront suburb of Roseneath before his enforced move to Auckland. He had his first swimming lesson aged 3, when older sisters Amelia and Ali dragged him along to their lessons. They went on to become competitive swimmers.
In central Auckland, Clareburt found himself unexpectedly living very close to the family of his best friend since childhood, Matthew Petersen. They attended Scots College together from Year 4, played rugby and tennis together and swam competitively. Amelia and Ali babysat Petersen.
When Clareburt moved north, says Petersen, he sent a Snapchat asking, “Is this close to where you’re based?”
“At the time I was living at home. I recognised the street he took the video of, and I said, ‘Actually mate, you’re just on the floor underneath us.’” The Petersens are on level five; Clareburt is on level four and gets fed weekly.
“Lewis comes around every Sunday for family dinners – we offer as much support as we can as we want to see him do well.
“He’s pretty incredible. He’s really respectful and down to earth. Behind all that, he’s a super-talented swimmer. He’s happy and bubbly – you swim much faster when you are happy.”
Clareburt knows this. So do his parents, David and Robyn, who’ve owned Wellington clothing store Man to Man since 1984. “He lost his confidence during the past two years, so it’s good to see him happy,” Robyn Clareburt says. “A happy swimmer is always a good swimmer.”
“You love to see when the work he puts in gives him the rewards he deserves,” David adds. “Swimmers’ whole lives revolve around their personal best times.”
In the mix
Since 2022, Clareburt has been beaten in the 400m medley on taper just once, the day Marchand set his world record in Fukuoka, where Clareburt finished sixth. Like several top swimmers, Marchand bypassed Doha this year to focus solely on Paris.
Since 2018, Clareburt has broken national records in finals at two Commonwealth Games, a Pan Pacific Championships, the 2019 world championships and at the Tokyo Olympics. He has socialised with and raced against the best in the world, and he loves it.
“When I am at the world championships and I’m mixing and mingling with the best athletes in the world, that’s the coolest thing for me – being able to have friends all over the world, including Olympic champions and world record holders.
“That’s my marker of ‘wow, I’m doing something pretty cool.’”
These top swimmers are now mixing with Clareburt. “Yeah … I’ve never seen it that way.”
Marchand is the swimmer Clareburt and Nairn most want to beat. At Tokyo, Marchand pipped Clareburt for sixth place by just 0.06 seconds, but his world record time is fully four seconds faster than anyone else swimming at Paris.
“Marchand’s only got that time once,” Clareburt points out. “But I am competitive. If he’s not having a good day, and I am, then it’s going to be a good race.”
Given Tokyo was quiet – it was held without spectators during Covid-19 restrictions – Clareburt acknowledges he has never competed at a pressure-cooker Olympic Games with noisy crowds. “I know. Neither has Léon.”
Clareburt’s winning time in Sydney was three seconds faster than he swam in Fukuoka last July.
Says Nairn: “We’re still gunning for that No 1 place at Paris, and we are just trying to set ourselves up as best as possible to be able to do that.”
Top medal prospects
Dunedin swimmer Erika Fairweather could join Lewis Clareburt on the podium in Paris and become the first non-paralympian New Zealand female swimmer since Jean Stewart in 1952 to win an Olympic medal. Like Clareburt, Fairweather heads to the games as a world champion – having won the 400m freestyle at the World Aquatics Championships in Doha in February where Clareburt claimed gold. She will compete in the 200m, 400m, 800m freestyle and the 200m freestyle relay.
As with Clareburt’s event, a number of top swimmers skipped the worlds this year to save themselves for Paris but Fairweather is still considered a medal prospect. Her Doha time of 3:59.44 has her fourth in the qualifying rankings.
In other disciplines, mostly familiar faces head the bid to better our record haul of 20 medals at the last Olympics in Tokyo. Dame Lisa Carrington goes into the games in the unusual position of underdog in the K1 500m event to fellow Kiwi Aimee Fisher, who beat her in a world record time at the Canoe Sprint World Cup in May.
Standouts in a strong cycling squad include Ellesse Andrews, who claimed silver in the keirin in Tokyo, won three gold medals at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games and at last year’s world championships won gold in the keirin and bronze in the sprint. Sportsman of the Year Aaron Gate is heading to his fourth Olympics and is part of a team pursuit squad ranked second in the world.
Eliza McCartney’s silver medal in the pole vault at the world indoor championships in March put a line behind six years of frustration due to a chronic Achilles tendon injury.
After his bronze medal in Tokyo, triathlete Hayden Wilde has enjoyed consistent international success and is currently ranked second in the world.
Our 20-strong rowing team includes nine athletes who have won world championship or Olympic medals.
The Olympic Games begin on July 26.
