Emma McKeon reveals she almost ended swimming career
She’s our greatest ever Olympian but Emma McKeon has revealed the moment in which she almost gave the sport away, and what made her into the champion she is today.
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A mother and teenage daughter sit in the family car, having the sort of conversation parents and teens have the world over. Outside school and sporting grounds, in suburban driveways and shopping centre car parks, the questions remain the same: “Did you have a good day?”, “School going OK?”, “How was training?”, “Is there anything bothering you?”
Or, in this particular car, on this particular day: “Do you want to give up swimming, because it’s completely OK if you do?”
Fast forward 10 years after her mother Susie asked a then-17-year-old Emma McKeon this question, and McKeon notes with characteristic modesty that she’s “pretty pleased” she ultimately didn’t hang up her goggles.
So is the rest of Australia, with the now 27-year-old McKeon’s blistering performance at the 2021 Olympics seeing her bring home an astonishing seven medals (four gold and three bronze), the most of any competitor across all sports in Tokyo.
It’s almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of McKeon’s Olympic achievement, her tour de force saw records tumble like so many tottering pins in a bowling alley.
To list just a few: McKeon’s Tokyo turn saw her become the first woman to win two gold medals on the same day (50m freestyle and 4x100 relay), and the most awarded female competitor in one Games in Olympic history.
If her previous four medals (one gold, two silver and one bronze) from the 2016 Rio Games are included, her 11-medal haul makes the freestyle and butterfly sprinter the most decorated Australian Olympian of all time – and in any sport.
So yes, it’s safe to say the champion swimmer gave the right answer to her mother all those years ago. But it was also, McKeon notes, exactly the right question.
“I remember my teenage years were for a while about wanting to swim, then not wanting to swim, and Mum and Dad were always really there for me,” McKeon says from her parents’ home in Wollongong where she is on a short holiday before returning to her base on Queensland’s Gold Coast.
“They’d say if you’re not happy just stop it, but if you are going to do it, do it properly. I was going back and forth, and one time after training I was sitting in the car with mum and I was really upset, and she just said, ‘Maybe swimming is just not for you, you’ve been here before’ and she asked me if I wanted to give up and told me it was OK if I did.”
McKeon is quiet for a few moments.
“What was great about that was that my parents gave me the freedom to come to that decision myself, so that when I did eventually decide to keep swimming, it was all me.”
And from then on, McKeon was all in, putting her own doubts – and the crushing setback that had fuelled them – behind her. Because at 17 years old, McKeon had missed out – by just one spot – for selection in the Australian 100m freestyle relay team in the 2012 London Olympics.
It was a tough pill for a teenager to swallow, especially as her older brother David did secure a berth in the 200m and 400m freestyle, as did the sibling’s then training partner Jarrod Poort in the 1500m.
“I was in Year 12 at the time I missed out and I was pretty upset about it,” McKeon remembers.
“I did go to London to support David but I just lost my own enthusiasm. Because I knew I wanted to go to the Olympics myself, but the next one was four years away and when you are 17, well, four years just seems like forever. So, with my parents’ support, I did stop for a little while and just enjoyed being a teenager, hanging out with my friends and not missing out on things because of training.”
But after a few weeks, McKeon found herself missing it all; the sharp smell of chlorine, the camaraderie of the pool deck, even the alarmingly early morning starts. So she got back in the water, both literally and figuratively. And she’s hoping her own sliding door moment might help another young person sitting in a car somewhere, feeling like their life is at a crossroads.
“I’d like to say to young people who might be unsure about what they’re doing, or who have missed out on something that it’s never too late to try again. There will always be another opportunity, and you can learn from any setback you experience. I think you can learn as much from losing as you can from winning, maybe more in some ways.”
In her lengthy swimming career McKeon has known the agony and ecstasy of both. But judging from her megawatt smile every time she stepped up to the Tokyo Games podium, victory feels a whole lot sweeter.
More so, perhaps, because for McKeon, particularly as an individual swimmer, it’s been a long time coming.
“It was Emma’s moment,” Michael Bohl says of the Tokyo Olympics “it was just absolutely her moment.”
Bohl, 59, who recently won Swimming Australia’s “Olympic Coach of the Year” has been coaching McKeon since 2014; first at Brisbane’s western suburbs St Peters club, and since 2017, in his elite squad at Griffith University’s Gold Coast Campus. But his ties to McKeon go much further back.
A former swimmer, Bohl was part of the Australia’s 1982 Commonwealth Games swim team, alongside McKeons’s mother Susie. He also was on the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) 1984 swim team with McKeon’s two-time Olympian father Ron.
Indeed, when Ron McKeon, who had previously coached his children (David, Emma and Caitlin) at the family’s McKeon’s Swim School in Wollongong, decided it was time for someone else to take over the role, it was his old friend Bohl he ultimately turned to (after relocating to Brisbane in 2013, Emma McKeon also trained for a time under Vince Raleigh at Brisbane’s Chandler club).
Apart from her own family, there is perhaps no one who is more thrilled than Bohl with McKeon’s Olympic performance – or who knows better what it took to get there.
“She really wanted this from the depths of her being,” Bohl says of her three individual (gold in the 100m and 50m freestyle, bronze in the 100m butterfly) and four relay (gold in the 4x100 freestyle and medley, bronze in the 4x100 mixed medley, and women’s 4x200 freestyle medley) medal haul.
But it was McKeon’s individual medals that saw her step out of the long shadows cast by swimming sisters and freestyle specialists Bronte and Cate Campbell.
“Emma has been known as a relay swimmer predominantly for some time, and everyone knows how good she is at that,” Bohl says.
Indeed, McKeon has swum on every single Australian relay team since 2014, in freestyle and butterfly 100, 200 and 400m events, and as part of the record-setting 400m freestyle relay team at the 2016 Rio Games. But an individual Olympic gold has eluded her, until Tokyo where she well and truly stepped into the spotlight as a solo act.
“Emma has been in a position to do something special for the last few years but then she has become sick or gotten injured at some really inopportune moments” Bohl says.
“She did really well in 2017 at the World Championships in Hungary (McKeon won silver in the 100m butterfly), but in 2018 she had shoulder issues and wasn’t really able to train with much consistency.
Then in 2019, she had prepared so well for the Korea World Championships, and then I think it was the day before her first swim she fell really ill with a really stuffy nose, and aches. She was really not well at all.”
McKeon’s sickness saw her pull out of 200m freestyle in Korea, an event she was widely tipped to win.
In 2020, it was not illness or injury that setMcKeon back, but Covid, the global pandemic delaying the Tokyo Olympics just as McKeon was really making her mark, winning gold in the 100m butterfly in the NSW State champions, and clocking the fastest time in the world. “She was visibly upset when it was announced Tokyo was going to be postponed” Bohl recalls, “she just started to cry. It was about a week after the NSW championship, and she had come so far, and was so ready, it was a bit tough to initially accept.”
McKeon agrees. “I think I was just in shock because I had been so focused, I didn’t allow myself to think about it being cancelled. Bohly said we needed to just take a break, take a reset and come back stronger, so he did the smartest thing he could do for me and sent me home.”
McKeon spent from March to July of that year in Wollongong with her parents, and younger sister Caitlin, spending time with her family, going to the beach and plotting her return to competition.
And when a well rested and relaxed McKeon did return to her first major meet, the Queensland State Championships in December, she put the swimming world on notice, recording the fastest time in the world for the 100m freestyle in 2020.
It was a taste of what was to come in Tokyo, and while some were surprised by her blistering form, Bohl and McKeon were not.
“I’d seen what she could do, what she was capable of, given the right circumstances,” Bohl says.
“The other day I found my notes from January 2020, with the times I believed Emma could achieve, and it was so close to what she swam in Tokyo, it was remarkable. I always believed she could do it, give Emma a setback and she’ll come back stronger every time.”
As for McKeon, she says Bohl’s belief in her has propelled her through every moment of self-doubt.
“Well, he’s the best coach there is,” she says simply.
“I think the biggest gift he’s given me is self belief. To have someone like him believing in you is pretty affirming. There have been years when I haven’t achieved what I wanted, or I haven’t hit the times I thought I was capable of doing. I’ve thought ‘I know I’m capable of doing something great, but maybe I’m just not going to pull it off’.
“Bohly is always right there to say ‘of course you can’. More importantly, he has taught me to base that belief off hard work. You have to believe it yourself of course, but you have to put in the work. It takes time, and it takes practice”.
It also takes nine, two-hour swims weekly, three one-and-a half-hour gym sessions, three spin-weight sessions, as well as regular pilates, physio, massage, psychology and diet sessions.
“When you’re training,” McKeon says, “every single decision you make, from what you eat to when you sleep 24/7 is about performance.” McKeon chuckles. “We’re all a little crazy”.
Right now, though, McKeon is taking a little time off from the crazy, relaxing after the Olympics, and also the European World Titles where she competed after Tokyo.
She is also – all these months later – still digesting her breakout performance in the Japanese capital.
“I think it’s finally sunk in as much as it’s going to,” McKeon muses.
“The thing is, straight after Tokyo we all (the Australian team) went into quarantine in Darwin for two weeks, and then I went to Wollongong to be with my family and straight into a lockdown for two weeks. Then I left Australia and raced in Europe and didn’t get home until last December, so it’s only really been since January this year that I’ve had a chance to really think about it all.”
And what does she think about it all? McKeon muses: “Well, it’s pretty wonderful, and now I am back and starting to do interviews and meet people who come up to me to say ‘congratulations’, it’s just really nice. I like reflecting on what happened, and the thing I really like is people have been telling me how good it was to watch the swimming during lockdown, that the Olympics helped get them through a tough time, I hadn’t really thought about that, and it made me feel pretty good.
“But I think the best part for me is the little kids who come and chat to me, because I’ve been that little kid. I’ve been that little person so in awe of athletes.
“When I was about five, I met Susie O’Neill, and also Jodie Henry and they were both so nice to me, so humble. I saw how they were, and I think it just stuck.
“Taking the time to talk to anyone who wants to talk to me is something I learnt from them, and something I hope I also do. I think it’s pretty nice that people want to say hi to me.”
McKeon is making the most of her time in Wollongong, spending time with friends, playing with her new puppy, Hud, and going to the beach before the craziness begins again.
Because make no mistake, when McKeon returns to her Gold Coast home next week, training with her Griffith teammates under Bohl, she will be “all in” again.
Because for McKeon, as wonderful as Tokyo was, it’s all about Paris.
“Everything I do from now on is about the next Olympics for me,’’ McKeon says.
“That’s why I’m having this long break now, since January. Because I’m getting ready, physically and mentally, for training again. I want to be fresh, and I want to be motivated. Bohly and I wouldn’t keep going if we both didn’t know I could keep improving, and that’s what motivates me.”
McKeon, who holds a Bachelor of Health Promotion, a degree she undertook part time for seven years, between her swimming commitments, admits that as wonderful as her break has been – “I’ve been going out a fair bit and was able to act as bridesmaid at a friend’s wedding” – there is part of her that’s itching to get back in the pool.
And while the next Olympics might seem a while off, the postponement of the Tokyo games means that Paris is now just two years and four months away. And in swimming, as in life, timing is everything.
McKeon will be one of the older swimmers in Paris, a testament to her long career in the water, and giving her, Bohl says, valuable experience at competing at an Olympic level.
“I think Michael Phelps was 32 when he won, and I think the youngest swimmer to win ever was 15,” Bohl says.
“So if you’re fast enough – either way – you’re old enough.”
And McKeon has proved she’s plenty fast enough. She believes she can go faster still, swimming out of the shadows, all the way to Paris.
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