Perth residents will be seeing a lot of Olympic gold medal-winning swimmer and former Mean Machine member Neil Brooks this summer.

Brooks, who is suing the Nine Network's A Current Affair program over allegations that he and wife Elle were involved in shady business dealings some years ago, will be in Perth for most of the summer to run in a series of triathlons.

The former Australian sprint freestyle swimmer, who was part of the winning 4 × 100-metre medley relay team at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, has been dividing his time between Bali and Perth and is training intensely - although Brooks says training in WA is far more pleasant.

Only a few years ago, Brooks ballooned to more than 60 kilograms above his "fighting" weight. Now, 18 months after Fairfax Media found him on streets of London, busking to try and make ends meet, he's eyeing off another world championship.

"If I'm training in Perth I'll train in distances, whereas in Bali I'll train in times and forget about the distance, because it's not just really hilly, it's really humid and you have to train differently," Brooks said.

"If you try to train in Bali like you train in Perth you'll be in hospital. You have to watch yourself because hydration is so critical.

Brooks says training facilities in Perth are also considerably better than Bali.

"Perth is the best place in the world to train," he says.

"The cycleways are just incredible, I've never seen anything like it anywhere. You can ride down to Pinjarra and back if you want, whereas in Bali there's a 15-kilometre loop that I do eight times.

"I've swum in four different 50-metre swimming pools this week in Perth, at Claremont, Beatty Park, Scotch College and at Craigie."

Brooks' WA race program will start with a half-ironman in Mandurah on November 6, in which wife Elle will also be running - and he'll race six times in WA throughout the summer.

"The half-ironman is not really my distance, but it will hopefully set me up for the first big one for me, which is December 14 at Hillarys. That's the WA State titles and also a selection race for the Australian team for the world championships in Chicago," Brooks said.

"If you win that, you are an automatic selection so I'm doing my darndest to get across the line there because if you don't win you have to take on other races around Australia to qualify."

To provide him with a bit of insurance a group of four of Brooks' old Hale School mates have formed a consortium and are underwriting his triathlon campaign to make sure he gets to the World Championships.

The 52-year-old believes he has what it takes to win, but the racing is tough in all age categories.

"At the world champs in London last year the guy that won our age category was faster than the guy who won the 25 to 29-year-old category and that's not uncommon for 50 or 55-year-olds to go past 30 or 35-year-olds," he explained.

"Maybe you learn to suffer more as you get older and at the end of the day when you are young you have so many things going in your life, living the life of a 25-year-old, but when you get to 50 that's your whole life, that's all you think about.

"On my day I'm good enough to win, but triathlon is a funny sport in the sense that if it was a swimming race I'd say straight out, 'I'm good enough', but there are so many things that can go wrong in triathlons.

"You can get a flat tyre or somebody can run into you or you can go around the wrong marker."

Brooks is cycling between 300 and 400 kilometres each week, swimming between 15 and 20 kilometres a week and running 75 to 80 kilometres a week.

It's a lot of effort for little monetary reward.

Brooks says if he did really well this year he might be able to leverage it to develop a coaching business.

"If I could pick up a world title in the next couple of years I could set up my own website, Instagram and do e-books, because I do have a story to tell, not only about triathlon, but about body transformation, coming back from 150 kilos down to 90 kilos," he said.

"I'm not going to make a living out of prize money, but I'd like to think if people want to share in how I do it then hopefully businesses will want to advertise on the site."

Brooks says he and wife Elle are still doing it tough while they wait for resolution of the case against Channel 9.

"People have spoken to me about a couple of opportunities in the media, but we need to put the Channel 9 thing to bed and we're going through the process," Brooks said.

"We have discovery in September, but if it goes to trial, it's going to be such a big trial that it will be hard to get a court date because they reckon it will be a six to eight-week trial because of how complex it is. It could be this time next year.

"We're not going anywhere though, we had a win over News Ltd, but nobody will employ me until we have full redemption."

Brooks said he had only been able to get through it all with the support of his family which had been "immense".