Australian swimming great turned Channel 7 commentator Ariarne Titmus says a second 50m freestyle world record is on Cameron McEvoy’s radar at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games later this year.

The 31-year-old McEvoy set a world record of 20.88 seconds in March at the China Open in Shenzhen on the back of a personally tailored “less-is-more” training approach.

“He wants to break it again at an event like the Commonwealth Games and he has never actually won a Commonwealth Games individual gold medal. That’s one thing Cam wants to tick off,” said Titmus, who will join the Channel Seven team as a mixed zone pool deck interviewer in Glasgow.

The “McEvoy Method” focuses on low-volume (under 1500m a week), high-intensity and strength-based training, prioritising speed work over traditional, high-mileage training.

Titmus, who retired in October after a haul of four Olympic and seven Commonwealth Games freestyle gold medals over 200m and 400m, will also record behind-the-scenes athlete interviews to be broadcast throughout the coverage, broadcast live, free and exclusively on Seven and 7plus sport from Friday, 24 July, to Monday, 3 August.

“A lot of people are really intrigued with his swimming career at the moment and how he is really changing the way we look at sprinting. He has such passion for what he is doing in the pool at the moment,” Titmus said of McEvoy, who won the 50m freestyle final in Paris, claiming his first Olympic gold medal, in 21.25sec.

“I almost wish he had have done this a few years ago so I could experiment and see if I could cut my kms and see how fast I could go for 100m and see if it worked for a 400m freestyler.

“I think more and more people are going to try and experiment with this type of training load.

“He’s swimming around 1200m a week in the water. To put that into context, my warm up for my 400m freestyle when I raced was 2km.

“Way back when he was swimming the 100m and 200m freestyle he would swim between 60km and 70km a week.

“But to stay in the sport and have longevity he had this idea after the Tokyo Olympics to experiment and see what would happen.

“It was a little idea he had which has just totally worked.

“If you gave the program to any other athlete I don’t know whether they would get the same results as him because he is so particular, so precise, everything he does has such intent and that is why it is working for him.”

Five-time Olympic gold medallist Kayley McKeown will defend her 100m and 200m backstroke titles in Glasgow and Titmus said the swimmer was in a good physical and mental space, having returned to her old club, UniSC Spartans on the Sunshine Coast, to train under new head coach Michael Sage after a successful partnership with Michael Bohl at Griffith University.

“She always performs when it matters. She’s had in the past 18 months with a change of coach, she’s back on the Sunshine Coast where she loves to live, she is very happy in her life outside the pool and I think that’s been a big factor for her,” she said.

Sam Short, a 1500m gold medallist in Birmingham in 2022, was also “really hungry”, according to Titmus.

“I looked at his swims at nationals and I spoke to him afterwards and he is as hungry as ever. And he is not afraid to tell people that he wants world records and gold medals,” she said.

“Birmingham was his first experience at winning a gold medal on the international stage and he wants to do that again.

“I believe we are going to smash it out of the park. When you get three athletes per event so there are many chances there for a complete podium wipe so we can win gold, silver and bronze.

“Sienna Toohey is a 16-year-old breaststroker who broke Liesel Jones (100m) age group record last year and made her Dolphins debut at the worlds.

“It was important that she kept her expectations low and just went there to gather as much experience as possible. I remember what it was like as a 16-year-old on the team.”

Titmus said Kai Taylor, son of Australian swimming great Hayley Lewis, was another up and comer to look out for.

“He made his Olympic debut in Paris as a relay swimmer and he did PBs at nationals a couple of weeks ago. He is really flying in the men’s freestyle,” she said.

Titmus said the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast, her hometown, were a launching pad for her own career.

“It gave me that multi-sport event exposure. It got what it felt like to be a part of a village, to use a dining hall, and walking big distances throughout the day while you are competing. It was good conditioning for the Olympic Games. It was almost like a mini-Olympic experience,” she said.

“It was also the first time I felt public expectation and pressure - 2018 was one of the biggest of my career. I had Gold Coast, a great meet, and later on that year at the Pan Pacs I broke four minutes for the first time, and then at the end of the year in December I broke my first world record in the 400 short course.”

The Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games will bring together more than 3000 athletes from 74 nations, with the largest-ever integrated Para-sport program, featuring a streamlined 10-sport program.

More than 200 gold medals will be up for grabs across the 10 days of sporting competition, including the biggest track cycling and swim programs ever seen at a Commonwealth Games, with 26 medal events in the velodrome and 56 medal events in the pool.