King Kyle Chalmers shares the toll of Paris Olympics and his future plans
The swimming sensation exclusively lifts the lid on what really happened in Paris and how his family and fiancee were threatened. So, what’s next for King Kyle? Here he explains.
Lifestyle
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Kyle Chalmers is rediscovering himself.
Not King Kyle the swimming sensation, the sprint star and relay anchor who has captivated a nation with his see-it-to-believe ability to chase down his competition.
That part is always there. Chalmers has just won his 7th, 8th and 9th Olympic medals at his third games, cementing his status as one of Australia’s swimming greats.
Two months after his 100m showdown with Pan Zhanle captured the attention of the world, Chalmers is reconnecting with the person he is away from the pool.
“I’ve got to attend to the human side of Kyle,” he says, sipping a fresh juice at a cafe around the corner from his home on the bushy outskirts of Adelaide.
It has meant filling his days with less training and more of the things you might expect from a 26-year-old.
Chalmers and his fiancee, Norwegian swimmer Ingeborg Løyning, are planning their weddings (a formal event in Norway and “more of a party” in his hometown of Port Lincoln, on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula) and they’re finally getting to spend some time with their puppy. Chalmers has gone back to work as a labourer – a job he says allows him to “just be one of the boys on the building site” – and he recently returned from a trip to Las Vegas with friends to watch the UFC.
“I’ve never been on a holiday before so it’s kind of important for me to have some time away from the pool at the moment,” he says.
His attempt at finding some kind of normality comes at the end of a period of upheaval – even by Chalmers’ standards.
In March, 140 days out from the Paris games, his longtime coach Peter Bishop was suddenly stood down following an investigation by the South Australian Sports Institute.
Bishop’s accreditation was revoked, meaning he could not coach at the Olympics, and he was moved to a different role within the SASI.
Chalmers was gutted. On the final stretch into the games, it was a devastating loss and a decision he questions to this day.
“I don’t think any other countries or squads or institutes would be making a decision like that so close to an Olympics and letting that impact athletes so much,” he says.
He packed up his life and moved to the Sunshine Coast to train under Ashley Delaney, another highly respected coach, but says losing Bishop that close to the games was “probably the hardest experience I’ve ever had to go through”.
“My coach is my rock that I’ve had for 12 years,” he says. “He’s a best friend, a father figure, a mentor – someone that I spend 30 to 40 hours a week with, I travel the world with, so losing him so close to the competition we’d worked so hard for for the last 12 years essentially, was very challenging.
“And I don’t think anyone could really understand how hard that is until you actually have to go through it yourself.”
Compounding the emotional toll of losing Bishop were a number of physical battles in the months leading up to the games.
Chalmers has had his fair share of them over the years.
In June, he revealed he had been battling bulging discs and a degenerative spine, and needed cortisone injections in the lead-up to Olympic trials.
It was hardly the perfect preparation for a competition where one percenters make all the difference.
Yet Chalmers thrives under less-than-ideal circumstances. He relishes underdog status, and has made his name on his ability to produce brilliance under pressure.
Come race time, he was able to put the struggles of the last few months behind him. That’s the benefit of experience.
“I think I’ve been through so many things in my swimming career now that I’m able to draw on things from the past,” he says.
“I felt like I’d been through everything that swimming could possibly throw at me, every challenge.” But what happened in Paris, Chalmers admits, was unlike anything he’d ever dealt with before.
He’d had a blistering start to his Olympic campaign. In the 4x100m freestyle relay, he swam a split faster than the world record at the time to claim silver for the Australians. It was vintage Chalmers.
Two nights later, the stage was set for the individual final.
There was hope among the Australian camp that Chalmers could overcome rival Pan to claim his second gold medal in the event – Pan’s heat swim had been so lacklustre he’d barely made the semi-final.
True to form, Chalmers rose to the occasion. But Pan was superhuman, smashing the world record and finishing a full body-length ahead of Chalmers, who took second.
In an interview with Chinese media on the pool deck, moments after the race finished, Pan alleged Chalmers had snubbed him in the lead-up. It ignited a social media storm on a scale Chalmers couldn’t have imagined.
Still midway through his racing program, he tried to block out the noise but googled his name out of curiosity to find a headline that read “660 million people turn against Kyle Chalmers”.
Chalmers thought of Mack Horton, his former teammate who was inundated with slurs and threats after he refused to stand beside Chinese swimmer Sun Yang on the World Championships medal podium in 2019. Sun had served a doping ban and Horton was unhappy he had been allowed to compete ahead of a Court of Arbitration for Sport hearing.
In Horton’s case – and now in Chalmers’ – the abuse came thick and fast.
At a time when Chalmers should have been focused on competition, it was impossible to switch it off.
“It was very stressful in that period, getting heaps of death threats come through and pretty horrendous messages,” he says.
“And then they started targeting my fiancee and family, and that becomes hard.
“Being on the other side of the world, you can’t do a lot about it.
“I’m trying to swim as well as check in on family who are in Paris, travelling around solo.”
He says credit must be given to Pan, who defended Chalmers in the Chinese media and the public pile-on died down.
“In the end it was really special that he did that,” Chalmers says.
Then came the endless questions about his future. Throughout his career, Chalmers has had to get used to planning ahead.
Four years ahead, to be precise. It’s a difficult mindset to adopt and, the reality is, sometimes it’s impossible. Some factors are beyond his control.
He says persistent talk that Paris could have been his last Olympics probably stemmed from comments he made about being “a realist”.
“I’ve had two shoulder surgeries, I’ve had my ankle operated on, I’ve got a bad back. I know that realistically this could have been my last Olympics,” he says.
“I desperately want to make LA but I’m not going to be the best 100 freestyler in Australia forever, it’s just whether my body holds up until then.
“My mind definitely will, my mind wants to continue to go even through to Brisbane 2032, it would be amazing to go to a home Olympics, but I’m definitely a realist in the fact that I know there’s younger guys coming through in the sport who are going to beat me one day and I know that my body is going to give out inevitably at some point also.”
Whatever the reason for the persistent speculation that Chalmers was about to bow
out of swimming, he found the timing to be frustrating.
It had overshadowed, at times, what he had come to Paris to do. “I think it’s quite unfair that in my special moment of just achieving my dream that I’d worked for for three years was ‘how does it feel to be in your last individual race?’” he says. “I’ve never put that out there or said that, and my intentions have always been to continue to swim.”
Part of Chalmers’ realism is focusing on taking it year by year in what he calls “the later part” of his career. Next year’s World Championships in Singapore will mark his 10th year on the Australian swimming team, and 2026 is a Commonwealth Games year.
Whether he makes it to LA or Brisbane or not, Chalmers is looking forward to one day living a quieter life.
Home will always be Port Lincoln, the fishing town and tourist destination where he still has family and friends.
Though he moved away more than a decade ago, Chalmers has stayed involved in the local community and, as time goes by, that connection has become more significant in his life. He’s now a major sponsor of the local footy club and sits on the recruiting board.
After the Olympics, he returned to visit his old school and swimming club. He wants regional kids to know there’s a pathway to the top. He’s proof of that.
Post-swimming, he plans to finish his trade qualifications and says his dream is to move back to Port Lincoln, though he admits he’s still selling the idea to Ingeborg.
“Being a builder over there is a job you can transition into pretty quickly and easily, so yeah, that’d be the goal,” he says.
He and Ingeborg are also looking at the prospect of opening up a swim school in the near future.
“We’re starting to set the foundations for that, do the business plan and start having the conversations to be able to do that,” he says.
All that is down the track at the moment.
Chalmers is yet to return to the pool but when he does, he’ll mean business. Even while attending to the human side of Kyle, none of the passion has worn off.
“I love my sport, I love the lifestyle, I love swimming, I love being an athlete,” he says.
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Originally published as King Kyle Chalmers shares the toll of Paris Olympics and his future plans
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