Kaylee McKeown is the queen of backstroke, yet this understated champion is the last one to see gold
She’s the queen of backstroke, an understated champion and some would say she’s so used to winning she appears bored, but that’s simply not the case for Kaylee McKeown, who could become Australia’s greatest, blurred vision and all.
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While Kaylee McKeown might well turn out to be the greatest swimmer Australia has ever produced, you wouldn’t know it from her often understated reaction when she wins gold.
But that doesn’t mean she’s bored with winning all the time or is uncomfortable being in the spotlight that is craved by some other swimmers, and even the occasional attention seeking coach.
It’s simply because she’s almost always one of the last ones to know the result.
The sometimes blank expression on her face can mean she’s still trying to figure out what the scoreboard says, even though everyone watching from the stands and on television already knows the answer.
That’s because while McKeown wears prescription spectacles to see everything with 20/20 clarity out of the pool, that’s not the case when she’s in the water.
While some swimmers wear special contact lenses, McKeown isn’t able to because of an allergy she has, so she has to make do with less than slightly blurred vision.
“I am actually really unlucky,” she told this masthead. “I get a really bad hay fever and I’m really allergic to like animals and dogs, even though I have dogs.
“So I itch my eyes all the time and push eye contacts way up in my eyelids and just fishing them out isn’t for me, poking my eye all the time.”
She also has asthma but none of that has ever stopped McKeown from racing fast as she showed the world when she won Olympic gold in the 10m backstroke in Paris.
Despite being unbeaten in backstroke since 2019, McKeown says she never knows whether she’s won or not because backstrokers don’t have the same peripheral sightlines as swimmers competing in events where they are face down.
“I kind of like that because you’re in your own race when you’re racing backstroke. You can see arms and splash off the turns, but the majority of the time you can’t see much at all unless you’re right next to the person,” she said
“Obviously when it’s a really close race, you have no idea so you kind of decipher through all the names on the list, trying to find where you are amongst that.
“Sometimes you get a nice surprise and sometimes you don’t.”
Mostly for McKeown, the number next to her name is 1, sometimes with the initials WR attached, indicating she’s just broken the world record.
She always goes close to breaking her world record so there’s a misconception she’s unhappy when she just misses it, as she did at last month’s Australian trials.
There’s another misunderstanding the Australian public is yet to grasp about McKeown.
Because she rarely loses, there’s an assumption it’s all easy for her, but nothing could be further from the truth because McKeown’s main opponents are world-class, most notably Regan Smith, who broke the Australian’s 100m world record at the US trials last month.
But history is the constant reminder of how big a challenge McKeown faces in Paris.
Only one other woman, American Natalie Coughlin, had won back-to-back Olympic golds in 100m backstroke before McKeown, while just two female swimmers, Krisztina Egerszegi and Kirsty Coventry, have achieved the feat in the 200m.
No woman has ever completed the backstroke double at two Olympics.
If that’s not hard enough, McKeown has added a third event this time.
She’s also competing in the 200m individual medley, where’s ranked No. 1 in the world, though her opposition includes Canadian teenage sensation Summer McIntosh.
If McKeown manages to win all three, she will go down as one of the greatest swimmers of all time, regardless of what else she achieves in the rest of her career, because she would have six Olympic golds, including five in individual events.
Only three swimmers - Michael Phelps (13), Katie Ledecky (six) and Egerszegi (five) have won five or more Olympic golds in individual races and only one Australian, Shane Gould (Munich, 1972) has won three individual events at a single Olympics.
Not that the 23-year-old McKeown is taking anything for granted.
“I never go into an international stage thinking I’m going to come out with a world record or a PB or a gold medal,” she said.
“So any time I get my hand on the wall and those things come along with it, it’s always a nice little surprise and a bit of a pat on the back for the training that I have done.
“Sometimes when you think too far in front, you can get greedy. I know that I’m probably in the peak of my sport now, so I’m really trying to enjoy where I’m at.
“I don’t think people understand how cutthroat it can be to get yourself on to the Olympic team, let alone standing up behind the blocks at an Olympic Games.”
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Originally published as Kaylee McKeown is the queen of backstroke, yet this understated champion is the last one to see gold
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