Adam Peaty shook off a few nerves on his return from injury to top the timesheet in the men’s 100 metres breaststroke heats and cruise into Saturday night’s semi-finals.
Peaty missed last month’s World Championship after fracturing a bone in his foot in a freak training accident in May, but he showed no persisting issues in his first outing at the Commonwealth Games.
He clocked 59.92 seconds – the only swimmer to breach the one-minute barrier – to win his heat and is well poised to claim a hat-trick of titles in his favoured event after prevailing in 2014 and 2018.
“(The foot) is good. I can dive so that’s good. It felt a lot faster than the 59.9, but, hey ho, that’s the timing board, isn’t it?
“I didn’t really need to do anything, I saw the heats come through and I was like, ‘You know what, it’s going to be wasted energy going fast this morning,’ so we’ll see how we go tonight.”
Tom Dean and Duncan Scott topped their respective heats in the men’s 200m freestyle ahead of Saturday night’s final, where the pair will go head-to-head in a rematch of last year’s Olympics showpiece.
Scott is also into the men’s 400m individual medley final later on Saturday at the Sandwell Aquatics Centre after finishing top of his heat.
A packed out crowd on the morning reserved one of the biggest cheers for Maldives swimmer Mohamed Rihan Shiham, who finished one minute 17.98s behind Scott in his heat.
“The crowd is amazing,” the 15-year-old said afterwards. “It means the world to me to be here. It’s an amazing experience.”
