One month after announcing he was diagnosed with testicular cancer, five-time Olympic swimming gold medalist Nathan Adrian said he feels “great” and is back in the pool.
Adrian appeared on TODAY this morning and said, “I’m back in the water, I’m training…it’s about getting on track to where we need to be.”
The 30-year-old posted on social media in late January saying, “recently, I went to the doctor as something didn’t seem quite right…I unfortunately learned that I have Testicular Cancer. On the bright side, we caught it early. I have already started treatment and the prognosis is good.”
Adrian said on TODAY the emotional impact of the diagnosis encouraged him to open up in the hopes his story would help others dealing with the same thing: “you feel so alone and so isolated…as I opened up about it, so many people within my own social circles reached out to me and said, ‘hey, me too,’ and I had no idea.”
Adrian has won eight medals across three Olympics – he was a member of the gold medal-winning 4x100m free relay team (along with Michael Phelps) in Beijing, and won individual gold in the 100m free four years later in London. Adrian reached the podium four times in Rio, winning two individual bronze medals in the 50m and 100m free and two more relay golds.
He got married in September to wife Hallie, and said, “when this came, it was certainly this moment of, ‘how are we going to defeat this together?'”
His sights now, he said, are set on Tokyo.
