Olympic champion, Broadway hopeful, magic man: The versatile talents of USA swimmer Hunter Armstrong

Olympic champion is not a role that Broadway aficionado Hunter Armstrong ever planned on auditioning for. Three years on, it is still a role he is trying to get used to.

“The Olympics was never really on my radar,” the Tokyo 2020 and four-time swimming world champion told Olympics.com ahead of the World Aquatics Championships in Doha. “I just never really thought about it. I didn't see my life going in that direction."

It was not that Armstrong was not good in swimming. He simply had many other passions outside the pool. Musical theatre, choir and football were just some of his hobbies growing up.

Years later, Armstrong is no longer the teenager belting out show tunes on the high school stage, but his flair for showmanship is still intact, whether it comes to the music he listens to before competitions or the card tricks he pulls out to impress his swimming idols.

Armstrong summarises the different sides of his persona perfectly: “It's just performing. I'm a performer.”

All that Jazz: Hunter Armstrong on the theatre stage

Unlike most swimmers he is now racing against, Armstrong did not grow up dreaming of the Olympic Games.

Describing himself as a “decent high school swimmer”, Armstrong believed he had far too many interests to make it to the top level as an athlete.

“My childhood, I just tried to dabble in everything. I was in musical theatre, art club, football, baseball, track,” he said. “I did everything that I could, and I didn't specialise. Seeing people like Ryan Murphy and Caeleb [Dressel] and the greats of our sport, they all specialised really young, so I didn't think that that was achievable for someone who had spread themselves too thin.”

Mixed in between swim meets and football training sessions, theatre rehearsals were among the highlights of Armstrong’s high school years.

He took part in three productions, playing Lurch, the gloomy butler from The Addams Family, as well as roles in Mary Poppins and Hello, Dolly.

Then his dream role came up. Armstrong was on track to play Sky, the fiancé of the main protagonist in the Broadway hit Mamma Mia! Unfortunately for the multi-talented teen, that production coincided with the junior swimming nationals.

And so, as fellow theatre kids donned colourful costumes and warmed up their vocal cords for Abba’s masterpieces, the future Olympian reached for his cap and goggles.

“I love that musical. Amanda Seyfried is incredible,” Armstrong mused. “When I heard that my senior musical was going to be Mamma Mia! I'm like, ‘I got to do it!’ but I promised my coach that I would commit 100 per cent to his programme, and I'm glad I did.”

Super Trouper: Hunter Armstrong’s quick rise to the top

The remarkable journey that Armstrong embarked on next was one that would have swimming fans yelling out ‘mamma mia!’ more than once.

Despite not focusing on the sport until his senior year, Armstrong quickly caught up with fellow swimmers.

His expectations of himself, however, took a bit longer to catch up. Specialising in backstroke, Armstrong went into the Olympic trials ahead of Tokyo 2020 hoping simply to be among the top six, which would qualify him for the national team.

He did a bit more than that, qualifying second going into the finals.

“I'm like, ‘I may have bitten off a bit more than I can chew’,” Armstrong recalled. “That was my first Olympic trials. It was my first time ever having semi-finals, and it was the first time that I was in the same pool as Ryan Murphy and Matt Grevers, and it was intimidating.”

Armstrong not only went to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games – his first ever trip overseas aside from a high school choir trip to Canada – but also brought back a gold medal from the 4x100 medley relay where he swam backstroke in the preliminaries.

Magic Man Hunter Armstrong

While Armstrong now saves his best performances for the pool rather than the stage, his passion for musical theatre remains as strong as ever.

As proof, one only needs to see the playlist Armstrong is shuffling through before walking out to the blocks.

“It's always musicals,” the swimmer said. “Some people listen to like Eminem… I'm listening to Wicked or Book of Mormon.”

Sometimes Armstrong also invites his teammates to tune in.

“I'm not trying to throw them off their game, but a couple of them, I'll just take my headphones off and be like, ‘You want to listen?’ And it's just like Wicked, ‘Defying Gravity’, blaring through my headphones,” he said.

Show tunes are not the only thing Armstrong surprises fellow USA swimmers with.

The 23-year-old also has up to 300 magic tricks in his repertoire. He was motivated to learn the tricks after an elementary school friend showed him one on a way to a swim meet.

“One of my buddies was in the back of the car with me and he's like, ‘You want to see a magic trick?’ I'm like, ‘Yes!’,” Armstrong recalled. “He showed me the cheesiest beginner, ‘How to do Magic’ YouTube video. But it tricked me.”

When Armstrong returned home, he went on YouTube and learned how the trick was done. He then picked up more tricks and held a performance for his parents.

His next stage was by the school lunch table.

“Anything to get the girls,” he mused. “It didn't work, but I tried.”

In addition to helping him de-stress after swimming practice, Armstrong credits magic tricks with helping him to break the ice with the legends of the USA swim team.

“It really helped me come out of my shell with the Olympic team. I mean, I'm just some 20-year old-kid. Never left the country. Never been on an international team,” he said. “I was still new to swimming and just to be thrown in with the greatest athletes of all time, when I'm just some kid who managed of squeeze onto the team, it was intimidating.”

To calm the nerves at the pre-Tokyo 2020 swim camp, Armstrong packed his luggage with board and card games. It was while playing one of those games, Cards Against Humanity, with fellow rookies that the team’s social media director spotted Armstrong and asked him to do a card trick.

“She's like, ‘Oh my gosh, that's really cool. You should do a magic trick to reveal the team captains’. I'm like, ‘Sure, let's do it’. She's like, ‘Perfect. Meeting's in 15 minutes’. So I just took off and had to invent a brand new magic trick that somehow revealed four captains and perform it for the entire Olympic team,” Armstrong said.

“It worked, but man, our media people were recording it and they had to edit out a lot of parts because I'm just shaking.”

The magic tricks did get Armstrong noticed. When the USA Olympic team was announced, Armstrong was backstage with the other swimmers as seven-time Olympic champion Caeleb Dressel walked by.

“Caeleb walks by me and he goes, ‘You're Hunter, right?’ And at that point I'm like, ‘Oh my gosh, Caleb Dressel knows my name! I know I made it in the world now’,” Armstrong said.

Defying Gravity: From Olympic trials to Olympic tribulations

Ryan Murphy is another swimmer who has had a big role in Armstrong’s integration into Team USA. The four-time Olympic champion took the rookie under his wing from the start and helped navigate him through his first Olympics.

While Armstrong left Tokyo 2020 with a gold medal, it was not the Olympic experience he had hoped for. He missed the finals in his signature, 100m backstroke event, and still struggles to take ownership of his Olympic champion status in the medley relay.

“It was a lot of mixed emotions with that medal because I just swam the prelim,” he explained. “I feel like I didn't earn that Tokyo medal. I think it would have been a different story if I would have performed anywhere close to what I did in trials, but there were faster backstrokers at trials than what I went in Tokyo.”

Armstrong did get a taste of what it is like to savour a champion’s status when he won gold in the mixed 4x100m medley relay at the World Aquatics Championships in Budapest a year later.

Since Murphy beat him in the 100m backstroke final, Armstrong thought he had lost his place on the relay team only to be surprised with a last-minute call-up.

“I was crushed because the mixed medley is one of my favourite events,” he said. “And then I was in the hotel, about to leave to watch the finals, and my coach calls me. He's like, ‘Do you have a tech suit?’ I'm like, ‘Yes’. He's like, ‘Are you ready? You're racing on the relay tonight’. And it was just so much fear, but excitement at the same time, just so much adrenaline because this was the first time that USA had really called on me.”

Armstrong is very eager to make the most of his next Olympic experiencehis at Paris 2024 - should he qualify

“I don't quite identify with being an Olympic gold medallist,” he said. “World champion… it's the same people, so I take pride that I was a part of something really big, but I'd much rather earn my own in Paris.”

And after that? Armstrong is not ruling out a return to the theatre stage, whether it is to reprise his role as Lurch or debut as Fiyero from Wicked.

“Sometimes I'll put on an accent at practice just to have fun, but I don't get to act much," he said. "Maybe after swimming, I'll get back into it.”