Saving the world in his speedos

LEWIS PUGH has smashed records with his endurance swims in the name of climate change awareness. He tells Samuel Fishwick what inspired him to go to such great lengths 

An electrical storm is flickering above West London as Lewis Pugh, the UN’s Patron of the Oceans, steps on to the rooftop of White City House. ‘I didn’t know there was a pool here,’ he says, as a fork of lightning splits the sky and the heavens open. ‘I would have brought my swimming trunks.’

Pugh, 53, from Plymouth, a man built like a 6ft 1in slab of buoyant granite, has braved more challenging elements than this. He has spent 36 years swimming nonstop to sound the alarm about the plight of the planet’s rivers and oceans: from the freezing Arctic to the wild Atlantic, and from the polluted Iguazu Falls in Brazil and Argentina (which left him so ill that his teeth wobbled in his gums) to the length of the Thames (which was little better: he spent a night in an Oxford hospital vomiting uncontrollably), all in nothing but his Speedos.

Pugh, with his sturdy, angular face, grew up on a Plymouth naval base idolising the explorers who had sailed from his hometown: Ernest Shackleton, James Cook and Charles Darwin. His father, Patterson, was a Surgeon Rear Admiral in the Royal Navy and present at Britain’s first offshore atomic test (‘I remember he told me that he literally put his hands over his goggles, closed his eyes, and when that bomb went off he could see an X-ray to the bones of his fingers’). His mother, Margery, was a nurse who took him fishing on the Tamar and Wye rivers.

With his sister, the family moved to South Africa when he was aged ten. At 17, after training for just a month, he swam from Robben Island to Cape Town. ‘It took three hours. It was incredibly hard, very cold and I thought I wasn’t going to make it. But I remember putting my feet down on the sand and knowing right then and there that this was something that I loved. It challenged every little bit of me.’

The urge to push the human body to its limit is not one most of us share. Pugh is just back from barrelling down the Hudson River in September, all the way from its source in the Adirondack Mountains to the briny Atlantic beneath the Statue of Liberty in New York: 315 miles in 32 days. That meant being up at 5.30am for at least five miles of swimming in the morning, then the same again at night; days of freezing water and dodging mouthfuls of sewage, and nights of sleeping on ‘hard as a rock’ beds.

Apart from a week’s rest after a big swim, he doesn’t stop: every day he’s lifting weights, swimming – and paddling his kayak furiously around Plymouth (he likes to race the Cremyll Ferry across the river and back again). His metabolic age – a number calculated by comparing how many calories your body burns at rest compared to other people of your age – is 40, but he still creaks when he slows down, which is why he doesn’t. ‘When you get to my age, the only way to keep moving is by keeping moving,’ he says.

The media branded Pugh’s marathon paddles ‘Speedo diplomacy’ after his swim in the icy Ross Sea helped secure a 25-nation agreement to establish the world’s largest marine reserve in Antarctica. Pugh, a maritime lawyer when he’s not wearing next to nothing, studied law, first in Cape Town then at Cambridge, but says action speaks louder than words: he now has a hotline to both Westminster and the Kremlin, having worked constructively with Michael Gove and Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu to make and mend international laws. In 2013, Pugh was appointed as the UN Patron of the Oceans, in recognition of his efforts to keep them safe.

So he’s dismayed that Rishi Sunak recently poured cold water on Britain’s net zero targets. Recently Pugh was due to appear on Good Morning Britain to talk about river pollution with Feargal Sharkey but was bumped for the PM and the HS2 bombshell he revealed at Conservative Party Conference in Manchester. ‘Leaders right now, if they don’t care about the environment, aren’t fit to lead. This is the defining issue of our generation,’ says Pugh. ‘And I’m not sure that people understand the speed of the change that is coming down the line. Too many people have lost their lives in the climate crisis. Too many people.’

I wonder if it’s lonely, all this swimming. In 2009 Pugh married Antoinette Malherbe, whom he met at school. But he spends most of the months of the year, hour after hour, in freezing temperatures, ferocious rapids and swimming against the tide. (A tiny team usually follows in a boat.) Though he knows how to beat off an oceanic whitetip shark in the Red Sea (give it a smack on the head), he worries about what’s lurking around the corner in every other way possible. ‘You’re never going to make money out of swimming in cold water,’ he says. ‘I mean, I have my own foundation. And, you know, I have to raise funds for the work that we do on ocean protection and protecting rivers. But it’s challenging. It can keep you up at night.’

Yet he really does fancy the human race’s chances of turning things around. The Hudson, he says, is a precious example of a river that has become cleaner (it’s one of only two distance swims that hasn’t made him sick afterwards – the other being the pristine Arctic). ‘Fifty years ago, a swim like that would have been impossible,’ he says. ‘I met one man who said that back then he’d wake up in the morning, have a look out across the Hudson and it would be completely white. The next morning, completely blue. Then the following day, completely red. Because he lived next to a car factory.’

Upriver, Pugh would do backstroke at night, as the pace of the current dropped by a knot, making it easier to swim, far away from towns and streetlights, gazing up at the sky above. ‘I’d start swimming at ten, 11 o’clock at night and the moon would come up and then the heavens were full of stars. Phew! It was beautiful, and very comforting. The Inuit people, they talk about how stars are little holes in heaven where our loved ones shine through.’

Thanks to stricter environmental laws, on his Hudson River odyssey Pugh saw bald eagles, the symbol of the United States’s birth, soar above the green forests, and black bears roam the riverbanks. He bumped into one while alone, wearing nothing but his swimmers, early one morning (thankfully, he says, the bear wandered off). He believes that fostering community and building cooperation on the ground is paramount to preservation. ‘I refuse to believe that we can’t clean the oceans and rivers,’ he says.

Pugh’s mother died in 2020, during the pandemic, ‘a very painful time’, when restrictions meant he couldn’t visit her. ‘I took her a few years ago to Elan Valley in central Wales, near to where she grew up. And there, the red kite had been virtually extinct. But they’ve been protected, and the numbers have returned. So we stood on a hillside and we saw these red kites soaring above us. I remember seeing the sheer joy on her face as they were looking down at us. And I thought: It can be done.’

lewispughfoundation.org