He is widely considered the greatest triathlete of all time.
He is the only male athlete to have won back-to-back Olympic triathlon gold medals, at London 2012 and then Rio, as well as four world and European titles – and yet Alistair Brownlee is still perhaps best known for the touching moment he helped his exhausted brother Jonny over the line at a World Series event in Mexico.
A brotherly instinct that went viral.
“Well, I think you can be slightly embarrassed by the moment – but proud to get recognised at the same time,” he said.
“It’s also slightly strange as an athlete because you feel like you should get recognised for the scale of your achievement, and that felt like a failure on the day, but it’s nice.
“I think for both of us it took our sport of triathlon to a new audience, and that’s special.
“It’s really nice that’s the thing that resonates with people, is brothers helping each other out. I think that’s something both Jonny and me are very proud of.”
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But without doubt, his proudest moments were his two Olympic golds.
I interviewed him the morning after his win at London 2012; he couldn’t stand up for the interview.
We had to find him a stool – he’d left everything and more on that track.
“It’s very, very hard to pick between those two (titles), but I think winning a home Olympic Games in London, that had been the absolute focus of my life really for seven years before, that is definitely the biggest moment.”
Having retired from the sport 11 months ago, he says he misses the pressure of those milestone moments and the simplicity of being just an athlete.
Passion
He said: “I miss lots of things about being a professional athlete. I think one of them is the scale of the pressure and the nervousness, and how much something means to you… how important the competition is for you.
“I also miss the simplicity of training. Training as an athlete is really hard – you’re doing something really hard every day but psychologically it’s actually quite simple, you just have to be the best athlete you possibly can be at the expense of everything else.
“I think it’s quite that binary. You’ve almost got this licence to be incredibly selfish because that’s what a professional sport is, you’re prioritising your performance at the expense of everything else.”
A 1.5km swim followed by a 40km (25 miles) cycle ride and topped off with a 10km (6 miles) run is not everyone’s idea of a fun day out, but for Brownlee it was a passion.
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“I tried a lot of other sports that I wasn’t good at, so triathlon was the one that I seemed most suited to.
“Rather than just swimming up and down, I was swimming in a pool, jumping out of the pool, jumping on my bike, getting changed – I kind of loved that technical aspect of it.
“And through my teenage years, it became clear that was what I was best at and the thing I could get international success at.”
Icy water jeopardy
He may have hung up his GB running vest but the physical challenges have not stopped for the 37-year-old.
This year alone, he has run a three peaks mountain race, been gravel racing – including an 800km race next week in South Africa – and run up the 86 flights and 1,576 individual steps of New York City’s Empire State Building.
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He’s also entered the Patagonman race in December, where the exceptionally icy water in Patagonia adds another layer of jeopardy to the challenge of a triathlon.
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Awarded an OBE this year – to go with his MBE – he was also honoured this week by Leeds Beckett University.
His was a glittering career, but he is still driven to work.
“I’m the kind of person who would always want to work,” he said. “I’m quite driven.”
Brownlee studied a Masters in finance at Leeds University so he plans to use that to keep forging ahead with his own businesses, as well as the foundation he leads with Jonny – The Brownlee Foundation – and work for the International Olympic Committee.
“I have a really nice collection of things to keep me busy,” he smiled.
