Crucially, whoever he ends up partnering, Williams believes he is returning to the sport a happier person than he was during last year’s Games. That is despite the scores of his monthly mental health assessments with Aquatics GB being lower than those of his team-mates.
“Everyone has got a baseline happiness, and I just think mine is far lower than the average person,’ he says. “That’s OK. I can live with that. If my version of fine is another person’s bad day, there is not really much I can do about that.
“It’s not suddenly, ‘Oh, I’ve got two Olympic medals, it’s going to go away now, I am happy’. It’s also not, ‘I’m going to be as low as I was in Paris for the rest of my life’. I have to take it day by day and do what I can.”
Leading into the LA Games, Williams knows the narrative will be about him trying to complete the full set of Olympic medals, having picked up a silver and bronze so far. For him, though, the aim is much more straightforward.
“I just really want to try and enjoy it because going into Paris, I wasn’t able to do that,” he adds. “Now I have done what I wanted to do in the sport, in terms of getting medals, the pressure is off.
“Gold is the only thing I haven’t achieved in the Olympics, so it will be stupid not to aim for that. But I am just going to try and enjoy myself at the same time.”