Four-time Olympian Cate Campbell on life after retirement

Her Saturday mornings are looking different

The four-time Olympian on overcoming regrets, building resilience and discovering what it’s like to have a weekend.

You’ve said it was your sister Bronte’s dream to compete at the Olympics that first motivated you to chase that dream yourself. What do you think it did for your own career to have someone so close to you relate to the demands of training and elite sport?

Being an elite athlete is quite an isolating lifestyle. And then being a swimmer, it’s even more isolating in that it’s just you – you’re not with a team. Having someone who was right next to me who could help keep me accountable in and outside the pool – and help motivate me when I wasn’t feeling motivated – and who could properly understand the highs and lows of elite sport was invaluable. I think because we had each other, it made us better athletes, but also probably prolonged our time in the sport. We both had very long careers and went to four Olympic games. 

After finishing sixth in the 100 metres freestyle final at the 2016 Rio Games, you considered quitting. How did you summon the strength to keep going?

The way I describe the period after 2016 is that it was like swimming had broken my heart. You feel betrayed by the sport; you’ve given everything to it, it’s part of your identity. A couple of things I learnt from it was that the only place success is possible is also the only place that failure is possible. If you’re not willing to put yourself in a position where you could fail, you’re also not willing to put yourself in a position where you could succeed. It’s easy to keep succeeding when momentum is going your way. That’s easy, but that’s not strength. Strength isn’t at the top of the mountain, it’s at the very bottom. Because I’ve reconciled all of that, I’ve been able to take on new and different challenges knowing I’ll be OK. I may fail, but I’ll be OK.

You’ve also spoken up about the importance of being strong rather than thin, demonstrating that even elite athletes aren’t immune to societal pressures and unrealistic body standards. How has your relationship with exercise and your body changed since retiring?

It’s changed a lot. My whole perception of being an athlete was how I could get my body into the best shape possible. After years and years of people commenting on how fit I looked and how strong I looked, of course that becomes part of your identity and how you see yourself. Now that I’m not doing crazy amounts of training, I’m having to get acquainted with my real body for the first time. I’m not artificially shaping it into something it probably naturally doesn’t want to be. I still exercise and eat well and I’m active, but it looks and feels very different to how it’s felt for my entire life. 

You retired after close to two decades of competition. What has life been like since stepping away from the pool, and what’s up next for you? 

The biggest revelation has been Saturday mornings. I’d normally train in the morning, so my weekend wouldn’t start until midday on Saturday. Having my Saturday morning back has totally transformed my life. I have a hard-and-fast rule that there are no alarms and I get to have coffee in bed. Probably the thing I’m most excited about is that I’m going to get a dog this year. 2025 is the year of the dog. It’s so exciting. 

The biggest revelation has been Saturday mornings. Image; Getty

You were born to South African parents and grew up in Malawi. How did those early years in Africa shape you and how did you navigate the transition to Brisbane after moving to Australia in 2001 aged nine?

It was a massive cultural shock coming from Africa. I lived in a city which I think had one set of traffic lights which probably worked less than 50 percent of the time. It was in every sense of the word a third world country. We arrived in Australia and my first memory, I just could not believe how clean everything was, there was no rubbish. All the roads were tarred, there were no potholes, it was this ordered utopian paradise. I used to get up early to watch the garbage trucks come by and pick up the rubbish at 6am on a Monday morning. It was as different as you could get. 

I’m really grateful for my upbringing and being able to have lived and experienced what life is like in a different country. It’s definitely made me appreciate Australia a lot more and while you do adapt and habituate to your environment, whenever I find myself becoming frustrated or jaded about how things are running, I still try and take myself back to that nine-year-old who was enamoured by that rubbish truck. 

You’ve said it was your sister, Bronte’s, dream to compete at the Olympics that first motivated you to chase that vision yourself. What do you think it did for your own swimming career to have someone so close to you relate to the demands of training and elite sport?

If you had looked up the definition of determined, next to it would probably say seven-year-old Bronte. She was the most determined and focused seven-year-old you’d ever met and it was her dream to go to the Olympic games. It took her beating me at a swimming carnival and winning gold medals and age championship trophies to inspire me to work a little harder than I had been. From that point, we decided that we wanted to go to the Olympics together. 

You were just 16-years-old when you competed at your first Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008 where you stunned the field to claim bronze in the 50m freestyle. With four Olympic golds, one silver and three bronze medals to your name, what do you think are the mental attributes that make a champion?

You have to enjoy the sport. When people ask ‘what is the secret to success?’ Firstly, there is no secret, it’s a lot of hard work. But you have to be able to enjoy that work. If you’re not enjoying it, you’re not going to be willing to put in every little last bit of yourself which, to reach an Olympic Games, is what is required of you. We [Bronte and I] were able to challenge each other and push each other, but also make it enjoyable because we legitimately got along so well, so we could make the environment enjoyable and we had other squad mates to help dilute the situation. 

We also, because we were competing against each other all the time, we got really good at dealing with competition. Most people don’t like it. Most people don’t like to be pushed or challenged, and to be honest I don’t really like it. But I tolerated it because I loved Bronte so much. Learning to be able to deal with the discomfort of having someone next to you who is pushing you to your limits and who will beat you sometimes, is a real challenge. There aren’t many squads where you’ll have people go head-to-head all the time for as long as we did, we did it for nearly 20 years. I think that’s a really valuable thing that we got out of it, learning to be competitive but not take things personally. 

Cate is supporting the ‘Don’t Drink and Dive’ campaign to help educate Aussies about the dangers of drinking alcohol in and around the water.

Originally published as Four-time Olympian Cate Campbell on life after retirement