She sits on the side of the warm-up pool, the cool water grounding her, and settles deep into thought.

She takes her time, sometimes chatting, other times letting the silence envelop her.

Then she makes a wish to her dad who passed away in 2020.

Every time, the wish is the same.

McKeown, 23, says, “Dad be with me” honouring the memory of her father, Sholto, who died of brain cancer at the age of 53.

That’s how she finds it, the fight, her almighty resolve and unstoppable power that’s made her one of Australia’s best ever swimmers, a history-making, world record-breaking athlete and five-time Olympic gold medallist.

“People are always like, ‘You get in the pool really early’ … I’m reflecting on what’s happened to me and that’s my way of appreciating the life that I have before I get in and do something special,” says McKeown, a backstroker and nine-time Olympic medallist.

“I don’t think I’ve shared this with people before but that is my moment where I’m like …”

She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath in, then releases a long, heavy sigh, and says, “It’s time to go.”

But last month at the first leg of the World Aquatics Swimming World Cup in Shanghai, China, despite going through the same ritual she always does, McKeown knew something was off.

WATCH KAYLEE LIVE AT FUTURE BRISBANE HERE

Her mind and body were exhausted. She had no fight left to give.

“I just didn’t feel like my normal Kaylee, the normal Kaylee who gets up on the blocks and wants to race,” recalls McKeown, from her home on the Gold Coast.

“You have the adrenaline and the nerves all running through your body and you feel like you’re about to do something and in Shanghai I was like, ‘What am I doing?’”

McKeown didn’t recognise herself as the swimmer she, and the world, has come to know.

The swimmer who two months prior put on a performance of a lifetime.

At the Paris Olympics, she became the first swimmer to defend back-to-back 100m and 200m backstroke Olympic titles (the “double-double”) and she made history as the first Australian to claim four individual Olympic gold medals.

She claimed five medals, two gold, a silver and two bronze, was named Australia’s closing ceremony flag bearer and came home to win Olympic Program Swimmer of the Year at the Swimming Australia Awards in September.

But in China, she lost all she knew of that fierce competitor.

Before stepping out for the 50m backstroke final, she called her coach, Michael Bohl, and her sports psychologist and said, “I want to come home.”

Bohl told her to swim one last race, win and then call time.

So she did and in spectacular fashion, shattering the 50m backstroke Oceania and Australian shortcourse record knowing it would be her final race of the year.

McKeown took to social media the next day to tell the world “enough is enough” and withdrew from the lucrative World Cup series, including legs in Singapore and Korea, to focus on her wellbeing.

She was overcome with fatigue but she was also overwhelmed with relief.

“After my final swims, I went and sat out at the warm-up pool and I just cried,” McKeown says.

“I wasn’t crying because I was upset that I had given up, I was crying because of the joy.

“It was a moment of realisation of holy shit, no one else in Australia, or in the world, has done the double-double in the backstroke and no one else (in Australia) has won four individual gold medals, this is something I really need to relish and realise how cool it is that I’ve achieved this stuff.”

She knew this was it, the end of three years of build-up, expectation and pressure, a years-long fixation on winning gold, and of proving to herself and the world that she could do it all.

The weight of all of this made heavier through the grief and heartbreak of losing her dad.

But now, overcome with emotion, she could finally see what she’s achieved through all of it as nothing short of extraordinary.

“You get so caught up being an athlete that you always want more and more and more and you don’t really sit in the moment and take it in,” she says.

“I felt like I had closed that Paris book but I clearly hadn’t, so going to Shanghai and racing was my realisation of, ‘Oh, I’ve actually done all I need to do this year’.”

It’s a realisation that’s led her to step away from the pool and take an extended break until at least January or February next year, the longest break she’s taken since Covid.

Knowing McKeown with her boundless amounts of energy and endless enthusiasm, she’s not one to easily stay still for long.

Yet here she is, in her Labrador apartment by the ocean, devoted to her two long-haired miniature dachshunds, Ottis and Texas, talking of sleep-ins, beach swims and quiet times visiting the property of her mum, Sharon, an environment adviser for Energex, and her partner, Scott Carter, in the Gold Coast hinterland.

She’s happy and content and, most of all, she’s found the calm she so desperately needed.

It’s the first time McKeown has opened up since China and talks candidly of the mental game she was quietly battling in its lead-up.

Where most swimmers were on a break after Paris, McKeown was back racing, and breaking records, six weeks later in the Australian Short Course Championships in Adelaide in September.

She committed to more events in October, including the World Short Course Championships, but her normally steadfast focus started to shake and she withdrew although, at that stage, still kept her plans to compete in the World Cup which was only weeks later.

Part of it, she admits, was distraction from coming down from the biggest high of her career.

She’d achieved her golden Olympic dreams, everything she’d ever wanted and more and returned a national hero. But beneath the surface, she was spiralling.

“As soon as I got on home soil (from Paris), I didn’t want to talk to anyone for a few days, I didn’t want to do anything and that’s not like me at all,” she says.

“Mentally you go from such a high to a low … you work three or four years of your life, in this case three years, for a moment and as soon as that moment is over you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s it? Now what?’

“I didn’t appreciate it as much as I should’ve at the Olympics … I didn’t respect myself enough to actually sit and say, ‘Holy shit, I’ve done something amazing’.”

Overwhelmed and unsettled, the questions swirled: How could she ever top this? Was this her peak? Could she do any better? Could she handle any more pressure? She had already come close to breaking from the pressure weeks out from the Paris games in a training camp in Canet, France.

“I was going crazy, that was 100 per cent the pressure … I had that little bit of doubt come in,” McKeown says.

“Going into Paris, all I wanted to do was to defend my titles, that was all I was so fixated on, I want to make that historic mark.

“I wanted to prove a point that I’m not just a one-hit wonder, I didn’t just come out and do the double in Tokyo, I’m a good swimmer and I’m good enough to do this.”

So just as she did in that training camp, and coming home from Paris, she let herself be human, to feel it all, then, as she’s learned to do, turn those nerves into her strength.

“When you’re in that space of being a professional athlete, you have to make decisions so quickly, you learn to either suppress emotions or bring them up and feel them … you have to be adaptable.”

It’s a strategy she’s learned over the years working closely and regularly with sports psychologists and, she says, of not properly facing the toll and burden of the Tokyo Olympics so close after her father’s death.

“I had emotions that I hadn’t dealt with and I had to learn to sit with myself,” she says.

“Which is why now after these Olympics I have to do this now (take a break) so it doesn’t happen in another year’s time.”

It’s now about longevity, she says, having made the decision to make a bid for her third Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.

She took her time committing to another four-year cycle and says she’ll only be able to cope if she changes her focus.

“I already know within myself I want to go because it will be my last Olympics and I want to go because I enjoy the sport, I love the sport, and I don’t want to do it for anyone else or any other purpose but myself,” she says.

“I want to stand up for my country and for my family in LA so I need to look long term and, right now, if I keep swimming that’s not going to be the right move.”

Since she was a young girl, growing upon a property in Caboolture in Moreton Bay, north of Brisbane, McKeown’s always had a wild and unwavering spirit.

She’d play with her older sister, Taylor, 29 (who has a swim academy called Achievers and a free diving business called Diving in Paradise) in their backyard pool, ride motorbikes, feed the chickens and “as long as they came into the house clean”, they were free.

In her younger days, McKeown remembers getting dragged to watch Taylor’s swimming lessons and when it came her time to learn, she wanted to be anywhere but near a pool.

“I actually hated swimming,” she says with a laugh. “(Back then) I’d rather be outside in the mud and getting dirty with my friends.”

It was Taylor who led the way in the pool, and went on to win gold in the 200m breaststroke at the 2014 Commonwealth Games and silver at the Rio Olympics in 2016, but McKeown was quietly making her own way.

Ever since she won a race at her school swim carnival in grade six at St Paul’s Lutheran primary school at Caboolture, her trajectory has been unstoppable. At 15, she made the Australian swim team, joining Taylor, who she cites as one of her biggest influences.

“She is one of the biggest reasons why I’m so competitive and I learned a lot from her,” says McKeown, with Taylor moving out of the family home at 17 to follow her swim career.

“She showed me the ropes from her actions, what to do, what not to do and just having someone else going through the sport at the same time made it so easy.”

In 2013/14, McKeown and her parents made the move to the Sunshine Coast, where they lived in Caloundra and later Sippy Downs, and McKeown finished her schooling at Pacific Lutheran College. They stayed there together for years, spending her father’s final years there, before McKeown joined her sister on the Gold Coast to train with Bohl at Griffith University.

They trained together for just over a year before Taylor retired in 2022 after competing in the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham and McKeown jokes of their sibling rivalry.

“She was obviously a lot older and faster and pushed me around a lot, then when I moved to the squad with her at Griffith here with Michael Bohl (in December 2021) it flipped … roles reversed at that point (and) it was the younger sibling finally getting their justice,” she smiles.

If you had asked her when she was younger what motivated her, she would have said her sister, but now she will say her dad.

In 2018, McKeown’s dad, Sholto, a FIFO in the mines, started complaining of severe headaches.

It worsened quickly into a loss of vision and vomiting. Within days of his first hospital visit he was diagnosed with stage four glioblastoma, a very aggressive brain tumour and given only a couple of years to live.

Over the next two years, McKeown watched the harrowing decline of the “typical Aussie bloke” she knew, the happy-go-lucky man who loved beers with mates, fishing, camping and his family.

“He went from being able to drive to not being able to drive, memory loss, not being able to walk, we had to move out of our two-storey house because he couldn’t walk up the stairs anymore,” she says.

“That was probably the hardest thing to see but, also, not one part of him showed fear to us.”

His final days will stay with McKeown as she remembers a powerful moment with her grandma as they sat by her dad’s bedside in hospital and she held his hand. He couldn’t speak but he was listening. “I turned to grandma and said, ‘I’m really scared, I don’t know what my life looks like without my dad’,” she says. “She (grandma) turned to me and said, ‘We’re all scared, Kaylee, but we’re all here for one another’ and Dad actually squeezed my hand … that was the first time I broke down in tears.”

He died a week later on August 13, 2020, just after celebrating McKeown’s 19th birthday together at home. Under a year later, still in the depths of grief, she was preparing to live out her dreams of competing in her first Olympics in Tokyo. With a tattoo on her foot which says “I’ll always be with you”, she found herself sitting in the warm-up pool before her first race, looking up to the sky to ask her dad to be with her.

And so the ritual was born with her dad’s memory fuelling her desire to live out her potential and to be the champion he knew she would become. “I know I have been through hell and back and nothing can really be harder than those times I went through and that’s the way I really look at it,” she says. “It’s also those last 15m when it comes out, these girls that I’m racing have no idea how much pain I have been through, so that’s when I’m like, ‘I’ll show them what I have.’

“I don’t want to waste the time I have on this Earth because you don’t know when it is going to be your last.”

It’s perspective. It’s made her realise how powerful she can be and to see a world outside of competitions, where she has dreams of owning a swim school and inspiring the next generation. And it is perspective she finds in that ritual before a race knowing, with her dad watching over her, anything is possible.