Watching an athlete who once beat a world record by milliseconds sit in a jungle and wait to devour a live cockroach on prime time television has a subtle allure. Somehow, it works even though it shouldn’t. More than most, Rebecca Adlington is aware of this.
The woman who broke a 19-year-old world record in the 800-meter freestyle at the age of 19 and won two gold medals in Beijing would later trade that life for a completely different kind of pressure from the cameras and campmates of “I’m A Celebrity…
Get Me Out of Here”.”After being evicted, she remarked, still clearly excited about the experience, “I wanted to do something that was totally different and really good fun”. She might have meant every word. It’s more difficult to understand why an athlete of that caliber needs the jungle to experience an exhilaration that the pool seems to have stopped offering.
The true cost of elite sport likely contributes to the solution. Adlington won those medals in Beijing at the age of 19. She was still in her mid-twenties when she quit competitive swimming, but she had missed the majority of what that decade is known for: impromptu travel, late nights the typical chaos of youth.
“Being an athlete, I haven’t done normal 24-year-old things”, she stated bluntly. Despite its artificiality, reality television offered something her training schedule never could: unpredictability. There’s a feeling that moving to the jungle was compensation rather than merely a career move.
After his performance in Rio, Adam Peaty became just the fourth British man to win an Olympic swimming title in forty years. Peaty has stated that he would like to take the same step. “My family are massive fans of I’m A Celeb, so that would be pretty cool” was a refreshingly candid explanation.
Not a strategy for brands. Not a change in the media. Just a guy who wants to spend a Tuesday nite with his family and be present on the screen. Even though David Sparkes, the CEO of British Swimming at the time, wasn’t as excited about athletes exchanging training hours for TV appearances, it’s difficult not to find that endearing.
After London 2012, Sparkes noticed a tension that wasn’t particularly related to reality TV. It focused on what happens when an athlete gains widespread recognition and the public wants to continue following them in any situation. With 5.5 million viewers, Tom Daley’s diving program “Splash”!
was deemed “gobsmackingly awful” by critics. Strictly, Louis Smith prevailed. Victoria Pendleton wore sequins while dancing. It began to feel less like personal decisions and more like something structural: the machinery of celebrity culture coming across a group of individuals who had spent years becoming exceptional and deciding it wanted a piece of them.
It’s interesting to note how athletes appear to perceive this in different ways. Using the same focused vocabulary that she might have used to describe a race, Adlington described her bushtucker trial while submerged in water, a crab biting at her. She acknowledged, “I felt like I was preparing for an Olympic race”.
Even when the discipline was consuming insects, the discipline persisted. Maybe that’s why these crossovers are effective at all. The mindset that propels a person to the pinnacle of a sport doesn’t just vanish. It changes course.
Of course, there are limits. Sparkes’ worry that “any day away from training is a day lost” is not entirely unfounded. In America, Ryan Lochte’s reality show seemed like a real-time warning.
It was strange to watch Michael Phelps learn golf from the former coach of Tiger Woods. It’s not always clear from the outside what distinguishes a champion who skillfully manages their public persona from one who quietly lets the advantage slip.
Even so, it’s hard to argue that Adlington made the wrong decision when you see her reunited with her fiancé outside the jungle, clearly shocked by how much the experience had shaken her and obviously emotional. She joined a swimmer who was also well-known. She emerged somewhat different from the person who had been spotted.
Not merely recorded on a scoreboard, but genuinely witnessed during challenging, uncomfortable uncertain times. She remarked, “Everything is heightened in there”. That may be the most candid explanation for why Olympic swimsuits continue to choose the jungle over the pool. People who are extraordinary sometimes simply want to feel ordinary.