But like many champion athletes before her, Stephanie Rice found there is a price for shining bright.

In the years since Australia fell in love with her at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, where she won three gold medals in record time, Rice is the first to admit life hasn’t been easy.

But through all her mistakes, setbacks and disappointments, where she’s faced several professional and personal false starts, now at 36, she finally feels settled.

Along with a new life in Dubai, she has just graduated with a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) and, earlier this month, married Mark Lassey, 46, among the vines at Sandalford Wines in the Swan Valley near Perth, in an intimate ceremony with about 40 guests.

It is, she says, a new beginning.

“I feel really relaxed, really calm, really hopeful about the future,” says Rice on a visit to her hometown of Brisbane.

“If you would’ve told me a year ago that I would be ... married, living in Dubai with great work opportunities I would most likely have questioned it … that is so far away from where I was at that time.

“Me, a year ago, wasn’t looking forward to anything because I was scared it would be yet another disappointment.”

Sitting across from Rice at the University of Queensland’s Business campus in Brisbane’s CBD, where she’s returned to celebrate her MBA graduation, she looks like the Rice we’ve always known.

The Rice who became a household name in Beijing at the age of 20, who went on to live and work in Sydney, Los Angeles and India chasing work and dreams in media, fashion, sport and, back home, appearing on reality shows The Real Dirty Dancing, The Celebrity Apprentice and SAS Australia.

The Rice we’ve watched reinvent herself again and again.

Now, in this room, she beams that familiar megawatt smile and draws you in with the same captivating energy and commanding presence.

In her first in-depth interview in more than a year, she is far from the woman we once knew.

In a 12-month period, Rice endured her most drastic reinvention yet, in which she pulled herself from her darkest days at the end of 2023, found faith, left Australia, moved to Dubai, met and married her now husband, finished her degree and found a happiness she never thought would be hers. To comprehend how she got here, a woman reborn, is to rewind her story to when it all started to shift.

Rice had worked in India since 2016 building a successful career as a presenter for the Rio Olympics and the Pro Kabaddi League (PKL), a hugely popular Indian contact sport. She’d spent years planning to open her own swim academy there and was happy.

So when the pandemic broke out in 2020, all the work and plans she had underway were taken from her and she returned to Brisbane to relaunch her media career in Australia.

But this was just as disheartening, she says, with sponsorships, deals and jobs constantly falling through. It was always two steps forward, one step back and it started to take a toll.

“I feel like you get one disappointment and another one and another one and after a while you stop thinking things are going to work out.

“I couldn’t see a way forward,” she says.

To take back control and be taken seriously in business, she enrolled to do an MBA in 2023 which was to be her focus, until the opportunity came to compete on reality TV show SAS Australia the same year.

“I really felt this was the moment, this was a sign things had changed, this is going to change everything,” she says.

“I had so much hope and I knew I could train really hard for it.”

Days in, however, Rice dislocated her shoulder, forcing her to leave the show early.

After a build-up of years of disappointments, it was more than she could take.

“I would just cry between every media interview … it was actually a really scary feeling because it wasn’t like I was just sad, it was this deep feeling: I don’t know where I’m going from here, I feel like I’m trapped in this place,” she says.

“I’ve never felt that feeling before.” She didn’t leave the house or talk to anyone for days.

“I would cry all day and I could not see a way out of it,” she says.

“I couldn’t buy more crystals, or read more books about positive mindset, or manifesting, or 12 steps to success. I did it all and nothing was there. I was broken inside.”

Rice is no stranger to falling to dark places, and falling hard.

After Beijing, where she won the 200m and 400m individual medleys in world record times and was part of the 4x200m freestyle relay world record-breaking team, the 2012 London Olympics were a major disappointment.

After undergoing three shoulder surgeries, she finished fourth in the 200m IM and was joint sixth in the 400m IM. When she retired from swimming in 2014, she plummeted further into a nightmare of lost identity and purpose with no stable work to rely on.

Yet her spiral at the end of 2023 was by far her darkest yet and was also around the time she was in a brief, unhappy relationship.

Rice turned to her sister, Courtenay, for help. Courtenay, who became a Christian three years ago, suggested Rice go to church with her at Citipointe in Brisbane.

“I was like, I don’t know if faith is the answer, I had no idea, but I knew it wasn’t what I was doing so I was open to trying something else,” she says.

Rice says she had always felt a connection to a “higher power” and often prayed in a church before big swimming races but it was never a significant part of her life.

“I was really ignorant of it, like I was not an avid supporter,” she says.

“We grew up Catholic so my only experience of church was school church or Catholic church which I always found a bit boring and disconnected.”

But in these moments, where she was vulnerable, deeply lost and curious, she found comfort. “I think when I went to church that day, I was just looking for something that made me feel like I could hope again,” she says.

Within days, she became a devout Christian.

“I’m not just going to put my toes in the water, I’m going to jump in because that’s me, I do things 100 per cent,” says Rice, who went to Clayfield College in Brisbane’s inner-north.

“I made the commitment to it not knowing if it was the end answer or the thing that would help but I knew I needed something.”

While discovering her faith, she was packing up her life in Brisbane and planning a move to Dubai.

Rice clarifies that despite happening in parallel, her conversion and move were unconnected. “I already made the decision to move to Dubai before Ibecame a Christian,” she says.

“I just knew I’ve always wanted to live overseas, it’s always something I wanted to do, I felt like if not now, when.”

Her fellow churchgoers questioned if Dubai, a country where Islam is the official religion, was the right place, but Rice says she felt a strong pull to the city.

“I already lived in America so I was looking at something a bit different and just kept seeing Dubai, it just kept getting put in front of me and the more I saw it, the more I thought, ‘I could live in Dubai’,” she says.

In November 2023, she moved and, in her first week, joined Kingdomcity church after it was recommended by the people of Citipointe while she was in Brisbane.

Kingdomcity has branches in 34 locations including in Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia. The church, in the Pentecostal tradition, was founded and is led by Malaysian-Australian Mark Varughese (who was Rice and Lassey’s celebrant) and has a reported membership of about 40,000 people. Rice posts about the church frequently to her almost 150,000 followers on Instagram.

The pictures give an insight into Kingdomcity’s grandeur, high-energy and high-production services with its soaring music, visuals and passionate worshippers.

And Rice now walks among them, saying faith “saved” her.

“It’s the day I decided this is going to be a part of who I am,” she says.

“I didn’t know what to expect, I didn’t know if it was the answer or if it would help but I knew I needed something that I could try.

“I feel like the fruit, the outcome, was in the tangible benefits that actually started happening and confirmed to me that I was on the right path … that this was the right thing for me. I felt the pieces that were broken started to get put back together and I felt like I had a bit more confidence and courage and (had) beautiful people I’d met in Dubai and family and support.”

It’s a support she never thought she’d receive if she stayed in Australia and feared the backlash of her lifestyle decisions. It’s part of the reason she left the country.

“I think it would’ve been really hard to stay in Australia, for me, personally, having just become a Christian, because I was really scared I would lose a lot of work based on the religious part. The challenges I faced were really heavy at the start, there was so much fear and doubt, what would people think of me, am I going to lose work, what am I going to do if this doesn’t work out, because I didn’t know if I could handle another thing not working.”

Rice admits her family, with mother, Raelene, father, Warren, brother, Mitchell, and Courtenay, have struggled with her choices but, overall, they’re supportive.

“I don’t think they really understood, I still don’t think they really understand why I have made those choices to move to Dubai and to become a Christian,” she says.

“Not that they’re not supportive, I think they just feel like, why wouldn’t you just stay here and why wouldn’t you just do what the normal Aussie does.”

She thought about keeping her new-found faith private in fear of public reaction and the thought of losing jobs.

But with a public profile, and a platform where she shares life updates often, she knew it would be too difficult.

“I think things were so bad for me (just before I) became a Christian that I was really OK with never working in the media again because if people in the media think that I’ve lost the plot, that’s OK, but I’m going to need some other job, so I just kept doing what I felt was the right next step not knowing what the road ahead was going to look like,” she says.

Rice is unfazed about what her critics have to say and, she admits, she gets it.

“I feel like that’s a really understandable thing to think if I was sitting on the outside where they were, looking in, seeing how dramatically I’ve gone from not talking about faith ever to such an advocate for it,” she says.

“I would never have been the girl that on Wednesday went to prayer night,” she laughs.

She’s read it all – the good, the bad and the backlash – and shakes her head at the reactions in her comments section that she’s “brainwashed”, “indoctrinated”, “naive”, to list just a few. Rice laughs.

“A lot of people thought I’d lost my mind or fallen under some cult or something and that’s fine,” she smiles.

“If you were a cynic or judgmental and you were like, ‘I don’t know if this is a cult’, well, I’m like, ‘If it is, I’m feeling the best I ever have and work has been better than ever and I’m in a relationship after being single for seven or eight years, aren’t you happy for me that I’m in a good place?’

“It might not be for you but I feel like I’m just grateful I get to rebut those people with actual proof.”

Where once the hate would have crippled her, it now barely registers. She’s found an overwhelming sense of calm, partly because of her faith, but also from years of being in the spotlight.

“I think all the things I hear now, I’m more than comfortable to hear,” she says.

“I’ve been in the media and been under scrutiny for a long time and I’ve made enough screw ups in the public space to handle and know who I am now.”

Of all those “screw ups”, there’s one she regrets the most. Four words she never should have said, and if she didn’t, life may have been different.

In the wake of the Beijing games, where she burst on to the scene as a 20-year-old, bright-eyed athlete to win three gold medals, the opportunities flooded in.

But in 2010, just as fast as it came, it was all taken away. Rice sent out a homophobic tweet after the Wallabies won against the Springboks. A “stupid mistake” that changed the course of her life.

She says she lost up to half a million dollars in deals and years-long sponsorships almost overnight, reportedly including one with luxury car manufacturer Jaguar.

With the benefit of age and wisdom, she’s extremely remorseful, but acknowledges it was the beginning of years of setbacks and disappointments and an attempt to find who she was away from swimming after her retirement.

First a stint in Sydney, then Los Angeles for a fresh start, where she worked at an elite swim school and coached private clinics. She dabbled in fashion, designing a children’s swimwear line, RACERiCE, modelling for Khloe Kardashian’s clothing brand Good American, and carved out a successful career in India as a sports presenter.

Her legacy from swimming lives on, however, with Rice inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 2019 but nothing ever seemed to reach the same satisfaction as Beijing.

“I really felt I had achieved the pinnacle of my life, nothing would be as exciting or entertaining, or adventurous or as financially rewarding or professionally rewarding as it was at 20 and, to think, what is left if everything else is down from here?”

Rice has been open about her battles and trying to “let go” of who she was to make way for a new version.

But all of it, she says, led her here, happy, calm and in love.

A mutual church friend set Rice and Lassey up but with Lassey based in Perth, where he was a pastor at Kingdomcity, and Rice in Dubai, they met over the phone.

“I remember after the first phone call (thinking) I know he’s the one,” Rice smiles.

“I don’t know why, it was just this feeling, the way we spoke, the way he cared about me. I just felt like he’s such a nice complement to the person I am that I didn’t need to try to be a different person and I felt like, for the first time, I could be myself and not have to put on a best performance on a first date.”

The pair met in-person for the first time in March last year, they were engaged in September and, married this month in Perth. Rice says their wedding was a two-day celebration, beginning with a ceremony in front of guests including her parents, stepmother, siblings and 86-year-old grandmother.

They were joined by Rice’s former swim coach, Michael Bohl, and Lassey’s three adult sons, Tyler, Joel and Luke, from a previous relationship.

The party continued with a dinner the next day doubling as Lassey’s going-away party from Perth, with the pastor moving to Dubai to live with Rice.

It will be the first time they’ve lived together with Rice saying they have honoured Christian values before marriage.

“It’s been a whole new journey for me,” she says.

“When you enter marriage, you have this real commitment to one another that brings a level of safety and foundation so then you can travel together and have intimacy after the fact.

“I’ve always said to Mark, it’s like you get to open all the presents under the Christmas tree after marriage in a safe, secure, committed environment.”

“I’ve felt really safe, really calm and really supported.”

As they settle in to live as a married couple, next for Rice, she says, is hopefully starting a family.

“We would love to (have a family) if that’s something we’re able to do,” she says.

“Mark has three kids so if he didn’t want to have any more kids that would’ve been a really hard thing for me to weigh up because I’ve always wanted to be a mum.”

Rice smiles a smile full of hope.

As the couple prepares to set up their lives together in Dubai, she has big plans and hopes to pick up steady employment.

Now with her MBA, she wants to work on business projects in the United Arab Emirates and be involved more in eSports (electronic sports/competitive gaming) – sheinvests in a Hong Kong-based organisation, Talon Esports.

Rice hopes to continue being a brand ambassador – she’s recently worked with Ancestry and Mercedes and currently with vitamin brand, Unichi – and speaking at corporate events, schools and now churches. Her main goal, however, is to work at the Brisbane Olympics in 2032.

“I feel like that would be such a full- circle moment for me,” she says.

It’s been a long road to get here, she says, full of twists and turns, but of all her reinventions, she’s most grateful for this one – for bringing her calmer waters.