He might’ve made swimming for three straight days and three nights look like a walk in the park, but Neil Agius felt some nasty side-effects during his 140-kilometre swim around the Maltese islands. And it stung the worst during those long, cold nights.

“Towards the middle of the night, at around 2am each night, he developed moderate signs of hypothermia with intense shivering, and this affected his morale,” Dr Angie Rogers, who was part of the team taking care of the former Olympian, revealed.

“I heard him when I came on shift at 2am say, ‘Oooh, I don’t think I can do this,’ he was struggling to eat, he was shivering so much,” Rogers said in a video. “When this happens, we were quite concerned because if that turns into severe hypothermia there is a big risk of him losing consciousness.”

“There is a critical temperature where the body will stop diverting blood flow to the brain, and when that happens, if he does faint in the water, then it will only be milliseconds or seconds before he starts to sink,” the doctor continued. “So we had someone on ‘Neil Watch’ the whole time, staring at Neil the entire time, to make sure he doesn’t show signs of loss of consciousness.”