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Cody Simpson is Prince Neptune. It is unclear if Prince Neptune the poetry spawned Prince Neptune the fashion label or the other way around, but the former offers a pretty wild window into a Hollywood celebrity’s soul.

“Enter now the eternal summer,” reads a passage from Simpson’s Prince Neptune: Poetry and Prose, published in 2020. “The crystal tropics await. A tribe of deep electric jungle. Face paint. Drum rhythms. Semen sprawled upon trees. Marble palaces on canals. Naked women on great green lawns. Joyous, sensuous copulations. At night. Beneath the incoming rain.”

The trees won’t know what hit them. When the book came out, Simpson described his process of narrowing down his best 100 poems from the 300 he had scrawled in notebooks since the age of 18. One of his favourites is called Man has never discovered new islands in previously charted waters. He often worked “intentionally” on a 1950s-era typewriter, and was partly inspired by American writers from the ’50s such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. A lot of the time, he let a stream of consciousness guide him.

“Some of what I write is more aphorisms, quotes and sayings, and then sometimes I’ll write short stories, bits of prose,” he said in a 2020 interview with Paper Mag. “I wanted to assume the role of Prince Neptune, use it as a pen name and alter ego ... an alias.”

In 2023, he reflected (via Instagram), that he released this “dazed and somewhat disorderly first collection of words” around the same time as he “started my journey as a swimmer … it must have marked a shift in the tide for me.”

It took some time for the rest of us to catch up.

Three years ago, in the lead-up to the Tokyo trials, you got the sense the majority of the Australian population were completely flummoxed by the cognitive dissonance of seeing a blond-quiffed, guitar-strumming beach babe better known for dating Gigi Hadid and Miley Cyrus and releasing singles with titles like Pretty Brown Eyes and Summertime (not that one) attempting to become one of the world’s top swimmers as if it were a cute, fleeting hobby and not a dogged lifetime pursuit.

It all felt a bit Brooklyn Beckham, the son of David and wielder of many half-professions including footballer, art photographer, model and chef. Cody Simpson: pop star, occasional actor, sometimes poet, elite swimmer. Once it became more well known that Simpson did actually have swimming pedigree as a successful junior, the situation felt slightly more comprehensible. He was returning to training under the guidance of two-time Olympian Brett Hawke, among other coaches, and was improving on initially rusty times.

He qualified for the trials and finished eighth in the 100m butterfly final, in 52.94 seconds. Swimming Australia’s Olympic-qualifying benchmark was 51.70.

Since then, the 27-year-old has been dedicated to this craft over the others. In 2022, he went to the Commonwealth Games, winning gold as a member of Australia’s 4x100m freestyle relay team, having swum in the heats. He now dates Emma McKeon, Australian swimming’s Tokyo 2020 golden girl.

To make a Dolphins Olympics team is a fiendishly more difficult prospect. In 2024, Simpson’s 100m fly personal best is 51.67. On Saturday, when he contests his pet event at the Paris qualifiers in Brisbane, he will have to prune half a second off that to better SA’s qualifying mark of 51.17.

“You can train for a long time for really marginal gains, microscopic sometimes,” Simpson said on Thursday. “So I got there, had a really great shift the first two years, and [have] just sort of been banging at the brick wall, trying to get that next level.

“The faster you get, the harder it is to keep getting faster. So it’s just going to be about trying to see if I can put something together on the night. The qualifying time is about exactly half a second faster than my current PB.” He figuratively touches wood on the partitions in the media mixed zone. “It’s not much,” he says hopefully, “but we just have a go.”

Half a second is both not much and also quite a lot in swimming. It took Simpson three years to improve his PB by 1.27 seconds. To raise the bar by a further 0.5 seconds in one swim is a big ask. His coach, Michael Bohl, acknowledged the challenge on Wednesday, saying “for him to make this team, it’s got to be a huge swim”.

On Thursday, Simpson “had a crack” in the 100m freestyle heats and clocked the 10th-fastest time (49.04 seconds), meaning he just missed out on the final.

“I did the best I could out there this morning,” Simpson said. “It’s a stacked field in the 100 free, so knew it was going to be a bit of iffy trying to get into that final tonight. It’s a good warm-up for the 100 fly. I’ve had a really good last six months of training, just absolutely flogging myself, so ready to hopefully get some good results this week.”

On Thursday, lining up for the freestyle at the Brisbane Aquatic Centre, he could have been anybody. Heat three, lane six. One of 105 competitors across 12 heats. There was no special attention from the stands. No extra cheering.

But it is unusual for the media to request to speak with a swimmer who fails to qualify for a final and does not have at least one Olympics or major medal already on his resume.

The Simpson story is not one of a past great making a comeback. It is not a narrative akin to that of Emily Seebohm, who is seeking to become the first Australian swimmer picked for five Olympics Games eight months after giving birth.

And, in a way, it doesn’t feel quite as romantic because people prefer hardship. They gravitate towards a slumdog-millionaire tale more than a millionaire-tries-swimming one. But there has been hard work in Simpson’s unlikely Olympic pursuit. To have made it this far is “already an incredible story”, according to Australian great Michael Klim.

On Tuesday, Simpson briefly diverted his focus back to the typewriter to reflect on “a cracking last four years”.

“Seems like yesterday it was 2020, getting back in the water raw and wildly unfit having not swum or competed since I was a little boy,” he wrote to his 5.1 million followers.

“To look back on how this whole thing has progressed is beyond me. I’ve given everything I have morning and night in training to see what I can get out of myself; burnt every boat I could burn in the pursuit. The physical and mental expansion that swimming has now brought me is huge.

“Along with all the dreams achieved in swimming for Australia. I’ve laid it all out there in these final six months and I’m very, very excited to race this week and just see what I can do. Thanks to all who have supported me on my ride.

“I do all of this for the 12-year-old kid in me. He’d be so stoked to know everything that’s happened. Guess he does ’cause he’s me! See you on the other side!”

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