‘I’m going to put my money on Australia doing really well’: Australia’s top female swimmers as you’ve never seen them before
They won gold in Tokyo and now Ariarne Titmus, Emma McKeon, Kaylee McKeown and Mollie O’Callaghan aim to dominate the pool again in Paris with just over 100 days until the Olympics.
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Australia’s female swimmers were responsible for 47 per cent of our overall gold medal haul at the Tokyo Olympics. At those Games – delayed until 2021 due to Covid – Emma McKeon became our most decorated Olympian, winning seven medals (four of which were gold) and equalling the most medals ever won by a female athlete in any sport.
Such is the calibre of our women swimmers that experts expect world records to tumble when they compete against each other at the trials in June as they battle to book their ticket to the Paris Olympics, which are now just over 100 days away.
So there’s undoubtedly a lot of expectation riding on the shoulders of these four women in Paris – which will go down in history as the first Games at which participation of athletes is split evenly between men and women – but the swimmers don’t mind.
“I thrive under pressure … I love knowing we’re probably the biggest contributors to the Australian medal tally,” says Ariarne Titmus, who joined her fellow golden girls McKeon, Mollie O’Callaghan and Kaylee McKeown for an exclusive Stellar photo shoot on the Gold Coast.
“It’s such a cool thing to think I’m part of a collective group of female swimmers that are potentially going to be the biggest medal winning group for the country.”
Each of them acknowledges that the rising tide of female dominance lifts them all up. “The standards in Australian women’s freestyle are set so high, so when someone reaches the next level, we all have to step up,” O’Callaghan tells Stellar. “We have to carry each other along. That’s the beauty of the sport – and especially the Australian women: that we’ve learnt to evolve off each other’s experiences.”
While all of the swimmers will face a teammate in their individual races, McKeon says their bond is strengthened by their success in the relays, particularly back-to-back-to-back victories in the 4 x 100m women’s freestyle against their US arch rivals.
“It makes us not just competitors,” she adds.
McKeown, meanwhile, says that while no athlete wants a repeat of the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro – where the swim team was criticised for underperforming – she’s excited to see what the Paris Games will bring when they kick off on July 26.
“We’re all super motivated and determined to get up and beat the US team and see if we can do better than we did in Tokyo,” she adds.
“If 2024 is a gamble, I’m going to put my money on Australia doing really well.”
ARIARNE TITMUS
Tokyo changed everything for Ariarne Titmus.
Her first Olympics saw the Tasmania-born, Queensland-based swimmer beat US swimmer Katie Ledecky – who is considered the greatest distance swimmer of all time – in the 400m freestyle to win gold, and then again in the 200m, making Titmus and her passionate coach Dean Boxall household names. But it’s a different woman who is preparing to defend her title in Paris.
“Going into Tokyo, swimming was my main priority,” Titmus tells Stellar. “I was very one-dimensional as a person. I gave up my study for swimming. I really didn’t prioritise relationships in my life. I threw everything into my swimming. And it was because I hadn’t won Olympic gold yet, and hadn’t achieved my childhood dream.”
But two benign tumours on her right ovary – which were discovered by chance during an MRI for a persistent hip injury last year – have changed the 23-year-old’s outlook.
“It put into perspective what’s important to me in my life, and the fear of not being healthy or not being able to have children really struck me hard,” she says, admitting, “I probably didn’t deal with the emotions initially. Swimming is my passion, but it’s also swimming up and down a pool. Yes, it comes with a lot of other things like representing our country, which is such an honour, and doing something I love for a living, which I’m so grateful for. But it’s also not everything.
“I said to Dean, ‘I would literally hand over every medal, every record, anything I’ve ever achieved just to be a mother.’ It really put into perspective how much I wanted to have a family. So that kind of struck me.”
At the same time, the experience made Titmus realise she wasn’t ready to be a mother yet. True to “The Terminator” nickname her father gave her for her ability to attack races, her fighting spirit has returned just in time for Paris.
“I definitely am behind where I thought I would be in my preparation because of my recovery from the operation, but it has made me get my ass into gear and just try as hard as I possibly can,” she explains. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, to be in this prime position to perform and go to the Olympics – and win.”
This time, Ledecky isn’t Titmus’ only competition.
Not only does she face a threat from 17-year-old Canadian Summer McIntosh, but also a rival much closer to home: fellow Australian swimmer Mollie O’Callaghan, who is
her training partner under Boxall and the current 200m freestyle world-record holder. “If you look at it in a negative light, it can be a tricky situation,” Titmus admits.
“But the scenario isn’t going to change. We’re both from the same country vying for an Olympic gold medal. If we’re both getting better and better and pushing each other, it’s a better result for [the team’s] relay.”
As for Titmus’ individual performance, she remains bullish on her chances for a podium. “These Olympics could be my Olympics,” she insists.
“Even though there’s extra pressure, with the learning I’ve done physically and mentally, I’ll be going into this as the peak athlete of myself. And I believe it’s probably my best chance to swim the fastest that I possibly can.”
EMMA MCKEON
During last year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup, Emma McKeon attended the Matildas’ semi-final against England and experienced the euphoria of Australians coming together to support our team. McKeon was on the other end when, during the depths of Covid lockdowns in 2021, the country cheered from its couches while she smashed through the pool in her freestyle, butterfly and relay swims.
“I’m not often the spectator,” McKeon tells Stellar. “When I’m competing, I’m in the zone and just thinking about what I need to do.”
But when she sat in the stands watching our national women’s soccer team, with her emotions running high and her competitive spirit devoted to the performance of others, she says she came to a realisation: “This is what it felt like … and it feels good.”
Paris will be the last time that Australians see McKeon swim at an Olympics. Afterwards, she jokes, she plans to “do nothing for a while”.
But considering the 29-year-old isn’t entering more races than in Tokyo and therefore can’t beat her own record-breaking haul of seven medals, why is she coming back for her third and final summer Games?
“In Tokyo, I did better than I’d imagined and when you finish on a big high at an Olympics, it makes you hungry to go to another one,” she says. “And even though I did really well, I looked at my races and I felt like I could go faster.”
McKeon and her siblings – older brother David, who is a two-time Olympic swimmer, and younger sister Kaitlin – were born to Olympic swimmer Ron McKeon and Commonwealth Games swimmer Susie Woodhouse, and their introduction to the sport was in a water safety program run at their parents’ swim school in their hometown of Wollongong.
As McKeon’s skills in the pool became evident, so did her drive to see how far she could take them. After missing out on the 2012 London Games at the age of 17, McKeon made her first Olympic team in 2016. “I like pushing myself for a dream,” she says.
“That’s the one thing that has kept me going for so long, because there are definitely so many other aspects of it that I don’t like and I’ve never liked.”
McKeon has become not only Australia’s most decorated swimmer with a total of 11 Olympic medals, but perhaps our humblest. She tells Stellar that while she has grown used to talking about herself, she doesn’t love it.
“I’m not really a centre-of-attention kind of person,” she admits. “Standing on the blocks, obviously I believe in myself and that I can race against anyone. But I also know that whether I do well or I don’t doesn’t change who I am. It doesn’t make me a better person.”
This was a lesson she also learnt after Tokyo, which coincided with the start of her high-profile relationship with musician and fellow swimmer Cody Simpson.
“The things that make me really happy are my relationship and my family,” she continues. “Swimming is not forever, so you have to be happy outside of that. And I am now.”
Which is why receiving this year’s Young Australian of the Year title, and being named a UNICEF ambassador, might eclipse all her other extraordinary achievements.
“Ever since I was little, I’ve had these huge goals of wanting to be the best and wanting to win an Olympic gold medal, and it feels really good to have achieved my dream. But it also makes me realise life is so big, as well, and there are all these other things I can do that feel really fulfilling.
“The satisfaction of winning is really great,” she adds. “But it also ends quite quickly. Especially in sport. It’s like, ‘What’s next?’ So being able to do things like UNICEF, and whatever comes next … Those things are more lasting.”
MOLLIE O’CALLAGHAN
Covid presented a silver lining for Queensland teenager Mollie O’Callaghan, who first started swimming simply to copy her older sister. While she was on the cusp of making an Australian team in 2020, the extra year of training brought on by the pandemic delay meant she attended the Tokyo Games in 2021 and walked away with two gold medals and a bronze.
So why is it that her name (or, in turn, her nickname of Mollie O) hasn’t been widely heard until more recently?
The reason is that O’Callaghan was assigned to swim the heats for the women’s 4 x 100m and 4 x 200m freestyle relays, but missed out on team spots in the finals.
“Making the relays was a good transition into the senior team, but missing out on the finals was really hurtful, especially knowing it was because I didn’t have enough experience to get into the finals, but I had the times behind me,” recalls the now 20-year-old, who lives just outside Brisbane and counts tennis champion Ash Barty as a neighbour.
“But it has made me hungry and driven me to absolutely push it to the limit. To kind of make it, in a way, impossible to leave me out this time.”
While O’Callaghan has contemplated joining the police force, she’s certainly made her mark on the swimming world since she decided to prioritise the sport, particularly after she broke Ariarne Titmus’ 200m world record at the World Championships last July. However, while Titmus might be O’Callaghan’s competitor, she’s also a mentor.
“The key thing is that we want to get the best out of each other,” O’Callaghan says of Titmus. “If [she’s] doing good, I’m doing good. That’s kind of my mentality. To be honest, sometimes it’s really tough, you know, always comparing yourself to someone else. But when we hop out of the water, we’re friends.”
KAYLEE MCKEOWN
Our lives aren’t normal. We aren’t normal human beings in some ways,” says McKeown of the average routine of a professional swimmer, which involves training at least five hours a day for six days a week, for years on end.
To be fair, McKeown’s swimming achievements aren’t normal, either.
The 22-year-old currently holds the backstroke world record in the 50m, 100m and 200m (the only swimmer, male or female, to do so) and is set to join the legendary Dawn Fraser if she wins back-to-back gold medals in an individual event at Paris.
Those accomplishments aside, her down-to-earth relatability – from dropping the F-bomb in her post-race interview after winning gold in the 100m backstroke in Tokyo, to being open about her grief in losing her father, Sholto McKeown, to brain cancer in 2020 – has won her
a legion of fans. Now the Sunshine Coast-based swimmer is taking the sum of her experiences into Paris to help her absorb the expectation and pressure.
“At the end of the day, I’m human,” she tells Stellar.
“I can put in all the hard work but, you know, sometimes you rock up and the day is just not meant for you. It’s meant for somebody else. I’ve done a lot of work within myself to be OK with that, because I know if I’ve given absolutely everything, that’s as much as I could have done.”
McKeown says her late father remains her biggest motivation. Every time she jumps in the pool, seeing the tattoo on her foot that says “I’ll always be with you” reminds her of him.
“I don’t want to let a day go by not giving 100 per cent to something I love because I know
it could all be taken away from any one of us in a matter of seconds,” she says.
“I want to be the best version of me that I can be. That doesn’t mean having gold medals around my neck or going back-to-back. It’s just me, being happy doing what I’m doing. Which I am.”
Like her training partner Emma McKeon, she has also found love in the pool; McKeown is dating fellow Australian national team member and 2020 Olympic bronze medallist Brendon Smith.
“I can only speak for myself and my relationship, but I really enjoy being with somebody who understands the determination and grit that you have to put into this life,” she says.
“Having somebody who understands and can support you through it is really special. And especially being able to travel the world – who wouldn’t want their partner with them?”
Read the full interview inside Stellar out today.
Originally published as ‘I’m going to put my money on Australia doing really well’: Australia’s top female swimmers as you’ve never seen them before
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