Lisa Curry reveals she wanted to make a comeback for the 2000 Sydney Olympics

Olympian Lisa Curry has revealed why she never wanted to retire, including her biggest regret and missed opportunity in the pool. Listen to the podcast.

Lisa Curry has revealed she seriously considered a comeback during the Sydney Olympic Games at the age of 38.

The swimming legend said that watching 34-year-old Holly Barratt win a silver medal at the Commonwealth Games in England gave her major FOMO at not pushing her career on to the 2000 games.

“I just loved every moment of it and I didn’t want to retire. I never wanted to retire. I wanted to keep swimming, you know, for the Sydney Olympics,” she said on the Stellar podcast, Something To Talk About with Samantha Armytage.

To promote her new memoir, 60 Years of Life, Love and Loss, Curry spoke about how watching the Australian swim team in the pool in Birmingham gave her massive “fear of missing out”; taking her back to the end of her career in the 1990s.

“I went to my coach and I said What do you think? Do you think I should give it a shot?” she revealed of a potential comeback at the Sydney Olympics.

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Curry reveals she didn’t want to retire from competitive swimming. Picture: Lauren Biggs

Curry competed in three Olympics: Moscow 1980, Los Angeles 1984 and Barcelona 1992.

“And the reason I said that was because a girl that I swim with, she was 44 and she still made the Olympic team, you know, in the sprint. And one of our girls at the Commonwealth Games yesterday, she’s 34, she won a silver medal.”

Curry swam for Australia from 1977 to 1992 at the Olympics in Moscow, Los Angeles, and Barcelona, as well as Commonwealth Games in Canada, Brisbane, Scotland, and New Zealand.

She won 15 gold, seven silver and eight bronze international medals, but never stood on the podium at the Olympics, and Sydney could have been her last short.

“There’s nothing to say that you can’t do it right?” Curry said to her coach.

But he replied: “Come back and see me when you’ve quit your job, divorced your husband and sold your kids, then come back and see me.”

Curry with her Kangaroo Mascot at the 1982 Brisbane Commonwealth Games.

Curry wins gold in the 100m breaststroke at the 1982 Commonwealth Games. Picture: Getty

Despite being one of Australia’s most decorated athletes, Curry never medalled in the Olympics, which she attributed to timing and life choices.

At the 1980 games, she competed against East German swimmers, and at the 1992 games she faced off against Chinese swimmers, two teams which swam under a cloud and rumours of performance-enhancing drugs.

“It was so hard to win up against those two ends of my career. So the majority of those medals were kind of like in between,” she said.

After writing the book and re-reading and reliving her career “a thousand times”, Curry realised why that Olympic medal eluded her.

“It’s because I kept having kids,” she laughed. “I’d have a kid, go to the Olympics, have another kid, go to the Olympics. If I stopped having kids and just swam and didn’t do anything else, I probably would have been a lot better.

“But, you know, your life unfolds the way it’s supposed to, and I would not change a thing.”

Originally published as Lisa Curry reveals she wanted to make a comeback for the 2000 Sydney Olympics