The Professor – Cam McEvoy – is the first Australian male swimmer to go to four Olympics after securing his ticket to Paris, and still hasn’t ruled out Brisbane 2032.

How? With a revolutionary new training program that the 30-year-old wants to one day share with the world. But first – Paris.

Less is more for McEvoy who has become a student of strength and conditioning in the power sports and instead of clocking up 30-70 kilometres a week, McEvoy is now maxing out at 2-3 kilometres.

His second swimming career started after taking an extended break from the pool following the Tokyo Olympics.

He missed the 2022 World Championships and the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, travelling widely in Europe, all the while looking for new training techniques that he could adopt.

He then ripped a 21.27 in the 50m free during the 2023 Australian World Championship Trials – his first PB in the event in seven years – and a time that was quickest in the world since the Tokyo Olympics.

His brilliance can be traced back to his determination to discover the most efficient stroke as a seven-year-old.

Sitting pool deck after his training at the Miami pool, a young McEvoy watched Grant Hackett and Ian Thorpe, religiously learning from their stroke technique.

At 17, he secured his first Australian Olympic Team berth when he finished fifth in the 100m freestyle and sixth in the 200m freestyle at the 2012 nomination trials. He helped qualify the 4x100m and 4x200m freestyle relay teams for the finals before Australia went on to finish fourth and fifth respectively.

Four years later in Rio, McEvoy claimed bronze as part of the 4x100m freestyle relay quartet, alongside James Magnussen, Kyle Chalmers and James Roberts.

McEvoy anchored the team home, swimming over the Russians to claim third. His split of 47.00 was the second-fastest of all the swimmers, behind only Nathan Adrian of the United States. In his individual events, McEvoy finished 7th in the 100m freestyle final in 48.12. He finished 11th in his 50m freestyle semi-finals in 21.89.

That same year he also made history by being the first man to claim the 50m, 100m and 200m freestyle national titles at the Australian National Championships.

In Tokyo 2020, he finished with a bronze in the 4x100m freestyle relay.
And then came THAT swim in Tokyo, where he became the oldest Australian to win a swimming world championship when he took out the 50m freestyle at the 2023 World Championships in Fukuoka, Japan. A time of 21.06 seconds broke a 14-year national record, as McEvoy capped a stunning resurgence.

He suffered the most agonising of near-misses when he attempted to defend the title at the 2024 Championships in Doha, edged for gold by just one-hundredth of a second by Ukraine’s Vladyslav Bukhov.

But as a consolation, he picked up a surprise bronze medal in the 50m butterfly.

And then McEvoy, schooled in physics and mathematics at Griffith University, went back to the drawing board.

POD POP UP STAT: McEvoy’s new training regime includes rock climbing and bouldering. He would rock climb or boulder five times a week, two to four hours per session. “The level of strength that they could exert relative to what I had ever been exposed to, it opened my mind to what the possibilities could be for transferring whatever I could develop into the water,” he said.