Meet Jack Burnell: Part Open-Water Swimmer, Part Kickboxer

Team GB's Jack Burnell doesn't seem like a character who pulls many punches, which is probably a good thing.

The 23-year-old competes in open-water swimming—an event he likens to being on a bike, "but you've also got someone trying to knock your head off!"

"It's always hard to relate to open-water swimming if you haven't done it before, so I try to give people analogies [to explain what it's like]," Burnell said in a recent interview featured in the Official Team GB Guide to Rio 2016.

"One of them is that it's a lot like road cycling in terms of tactics, grafting, people making breaks, and it's hard to go by yourself. But then I add into the mix a bit of kickboxing."

That's where the idea of someone trying to knock your block off comes into it. Open-water swimming isn't a sport for the faint-hearted. It's brutal and takes a warrior-like determination to come out on top.

Leo Correa/Associated Press

Far from the more serene events we're used to seeing in the pool, the open-water name gives it away. The sport is a free-for-all, where those competing get up to all sorts in their pursuit of victory.

"[It's] very brutal," Burnell added. "We've had multiple injuries on the British team: broken ribs, broken noses. It's not a contact sport, but we're in close proximity with one another and the refs don't always see everything that’s happening underwater.

"With it being highly competitive, there are underhand tactics you have to deal with which are just part and parcel of the sport. My mentality is always to go out there and win. If someone is going to use underhand tactics to try to stop me from doing so, then I see no problem with using reasonable force to prevent that from happening.

"It's a polite way of putting it! It's something that shouldn't be in the sport, but it is and if you want to win you've got to deal with those things in the best ways."

So competing in Rio de Janeiro when the Olympics get started this weekend should be, well, a swim in the park for Burnell (or on the beach as is the case, with the open-water swimming at Rio 2016 taking place at Copacabana beach).

Given his background, it's perhaps fitting that Burnell has taken up one of the more challenging disciplines that swimming or any other other Olympic sport has to offer. Open-water swimming—or marathon swimming as it's also known—is a real test of endurance and discipline, as you would expect.

It takes commitment to training to last the distance and requires a certain type of person willing to put themselves through it.

Burnell isn't your average sportsman. His road to Rio played out before a backdrop of failed goals and even a brief spell of delinquency.

During the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games—when open-water swimming was first introduced to the Olympic Games—a 15-year-old Burnell wasn't even swimming. He'd lost interest in the sport and paid little attention to what was happening in China, preferring to spend time with his friends, doing what bored teenagers do in the summertime.

"I didn't see the two silvers [Team GB won in open-water swimming] in 2008," he said. "I wasn't swimming back then, and I'd fallen out of love with sport. I had a bit of a time out and did the childish thing of hanging around street corners or in the park.

"I definitely wasn't paying attention to the Olympics, and I can't take too much from that. But I can take plenty from London 2012. I just missed out on the pool team, coming third in trials when they took top two, which was gutting for me, and I tried to watch as little of London 2012 as possible because it only reminded me of what I didn't quite achieve.

"It's a new challenge [now in Rio] and something I'm really looking forward to."

So how did Burnell eventually settle for running the gauntlet in the water? What was it that convinced him that it was a good idea?

"I was originally a 1,500-meter pool swimmer and, if I'm honest, it bored me a bit," he added in the Team GB Guide. "Eight lanes, eight people against you, same temperature water, you turn up and you're indoors all day. It wasn't my cup of tea.

"Being introduced to open-water swimming through the Talent ID programme really opened my eyes to the tactics and a completely different dimension to the sport of swimming which I'd not experienced in the pool.

"I fell in love with it from there. I still do the 1,500-meter [event] in the pool, but that's purely for the speed element. It's a good fitness test to see where we're at in terms of training and going forwards for the next open-water race."

Burnell was a guest on the Gadget Show on Channel 5 in 2015, and he was forced to put his own swimming abilities up against an underwater jet pack. He won't be allowed to use that invention come Rio 2016, but he says he has other plans anyway.

Warren Little/Getty Images

"It's a wicked invention," he said of the jet pack. "What I'm actually doing is building an internal one in training so I don't need the physical one to give me that late kick at the end, which will certainly replicate what the jet pack will do."

If it does, Burnell will become the first gold medallist for Team GB in the sport, propelling it further into the public's consciousness.

"We're going there to achieve nothing less than a gold medal. I'm just really excited to see what I can do," he says.

The women's open-water swimming at Rio 2016 will take place on 15 August, with the men's event following on 16 August. The distance of each race is 10 kilometers.