She’d just won gold at the Tokyo Olympics in the Women’s 4 x 100m freestyle relay alongside her sister Cate, and bronze in the Mixed 4 x 100m medley relay, but her body was broken.

At 27, she was battling with severe injuries to her shoulder, neck, back and hip.

Every day she was in agony.

At that point she had been swimming at an international level for 10 years and the relentless workload of training and competing, clocking up on average 19,000 strokes a week, was proving more than she could physically – and mentally – bear.

She was even considering hanging up her goggles and swimsuit for good.

“I was pretty over managing it and being in that much pain, but I also needed to do something different with my life,” says the 30-year-old, who decided she wanted to be an Olympic swimmer at just seven years of age.

So in 2021 she took 18 months off, finished her Queensland University of Technology degree in business and began working as a senior consultant at top-tier accounting and professional services firm Ernst & Young.

“You’ve got to prove to yourself that you can do something different from your sport,” the whip-smart, go-getter says.

“It was a mental break and a physical break. I needed both of those things.”

But just as her corporate career was beginning to take off, she couldn’t get the thought of swimming out of her head. Like the pull of a rip tide, it tugged at her, the idea of what she could do if she gave it just one more shot.

Holding her back were all the sacrifices she would have to make. The healthy corporate salary compared to her measly $30,000 a year as a swimmer. The time away from her family and partner of seven years, Benfield Lainchbury. The chance to see her friends’ kids’ milestones as they grow up, and the opportunity to potentially buy a home. “The decision to go from a salary job to the enormous uncertainty that is sport, especially Olympic sport, and setting yourself up as an adult and then going back to a way of living in a way that a bank’s never going to finance your mortgage because they don’t understand what this is that you get judged once a year at trials and then that determines your funding for the rest of the year. That’s a big decision,” she says pragmatically.

Unable to come to a conclusion about what she should do, she decided to simply get back in the pool and see if she liked it.

The break had given her a chance to work on her injuries, rehab them properly, build strength around them, and find new and interesting ways to manage them, with activities like yoga.

She was soon in the lowest level of pain she’d had in years, and she was feeling good.

“To be able to start swimming and not be in pain was then really exciting to be like, ‘What can I actually achieve if I’m not severely hampered by injuries?’,” she says, in between cheerily greeting other swimmers as we sit in her old stomping ground of Centenary Pool in Brisbane’s Spring Hill.

Suddenly the decision was clear. She was going to go for glory and chase her fourth Olympics at Paris 2024, and the chance to be one of just five Australian swimmers to win gold at three Olympic Games.

She said goodbye to EY and made the semi-permanent move to Canberra, leaving behind her coach of 21 years, Simon Cusack, to train at the Australian Institute of Sport under new coach Shannon Rollason, who worked as the AIS head coach and took swimmer Jodie Henry to Olympic gold in the 100m freestyle in Athens.

Campbell flies back to Sydney one week a month to see Lainchbury, who runs a landscaping business.

“To step away and make a change and then come back, that was really powerful for me,” she says with a level of intensity that is no doubt behind much of her success in the pool.

“It felt a lot more like I was choosing to be there every day when I was at the pool because I had a whole other life and whole other options, which I was really enjoying and really happy with, but I just wanted one more shot at this.”

In fact, Campbell says this time around, the love of the journey has to be greater than any possible result.

She told herself if she was to re-enter the pool professionally, she had to be OK with losing and OK with not even making the team.

“The decision to come back and all the consequences that go with that: moving, the impact on your relationship, the impact on your finances, the impact on your job – all of those things that go with it, for me, it had to be worth it regardless of the result,” she says.

And so far, it has been.

In the South Australian State Open Championships in January, Campbell beat older sister Cate to win the Women’s 100m freestyle; while in March she won the Women’s 50m freestyle at the NSW State Championships.

She says she never expected to be swimming “this fast, this quickly”, but credits it to her new coach, new technique and spending up to two hours each day stretching and rehabilitating her injuries, which now include a calf tear.

She says it’s also about having goals and challenges outside of the pool, like her two new businesses: swimming accessory company PB With Bronte, and activewear company Earthletica, which she co-founded with Libby Babet and Chris Raleigh.

“I don’t think I could come back and just be swimming and not have anything else going on, it wouldn’t work for me,” she says.

PB sells kickboards, pull buoys and swimming caps for everyone from beginner swimmers to professionals, with each accessory coming with a video linked through a QR code featuring tips and tricks from Campbell on how to use the device and become a better swimmer.

“PB actually started during Covid,” she says.

“I was swimming a lot in the ocean because all the pools were closed and swimming with lots of other ocean swimmers and they were all asking me for tips and how to improve their swimming. Out of that I was recommending gear to people left, right and centre.”

She says seeing the difference the equipment and her advice made to their swimming became her major drive – that and wanting the accessories for herself to use each day.

“Most swim gear is made for kids and it’s fluoro and it’s got an octopus on it,” she says. “I’m like, ‘I’m a grown-up. Can I please have something that suits my aesthetic a little more?’

“I think the bit that’s missing is, when you’re a beginner, you’re not quite sure how to use (the gear) and that’s where I want this to be different (with the videos).” Meanwhile, Earthletica is aiming to be a disrupter in the activewear industry, with its game-changing commitment to sustainability that promises to rattle the big players.

The company makes all its products from either recycled or natural materials, it produces lines only in small batches so everything made is sold, going against the industry standard where up to 40 per cent of clothes produced each year don’t ever make it into consumers’ hands; and it is investing in new fabric technologies allowing its ranges to be made from all manner of recycled materials.

The brand has also partnered with textile waste management company Upparel, which
re-purposes or recycles clothing, giving it to charities or turning it into a new fabric for packaging, signage and homewares. And Earthletica works with full service circular fashion business Re-mint, where customers can buy and sell pre-owned garments.

“We want to start from, ‘What does it look like if sustainability is the baseline and then everything else is on top of that?’” says Campbell, as her tall and muscular frame dons one of the brand’s slick new sets for our shoot.

“We build really nice, high performance activewear that will perform really well and last for a long time, but sustainability is a non-negotiable across every single product line.”

The champion athlete is even calling out other big brands for not doing more for the planet, and helping stop some of the 92 million tonnes of clothing that end up in landfill globally each year.

“A lot of people say they want to do sustainability. Pretty much every activewear company says they want to do it.

“They have millions and millions of dollars and they’re not doing this,” she says, revealing she knew very little about fabrics, the fashion industry or manufacturing clothing before joining the business.

“We are three people in a start-up and if we can do this, what are you doing? What are you doing, big businesses? What are you doing with your budget? You’re obviously not wanting to be meaningfully sustainable otherwise you would be doing it.”

Campbell says her passion for saving the planet comes after growing up in South Africa and living in Australia surrounded by nature, as well as her love for plants – with about 30 different forms of greenery filling her home.

“I grew up running around barefoot in a rainforest basically, so I’m very passionate about all these things still being here for my kids and their grandkids,” she says.

While Earthletica is currently focusing on womenswear, the plan is to expand into menswear as well, while increasing its range to include T-shirts, tracksuits, jackets and more. Campbell, who is the publicity lead and brand ambassador for the company, says she can’t wait to see where their relentless pursuit of sustainability takes them, and hopes the business will be a catalyst for other fashion and activewear enterprises to do more environmentally.

For now though, fixing the planet one sports bra at a time will have to wait until after the Olympics.

“I have my three priorities which are swimming, Earthletica and PB and I’ll never let go of any of the priorities but they might have to shuffle around,” she says.

“I know that for this period, swimming has to be No.1 and it’s a non-negotiable.”

What will also have to wait is any plans to marry boyfriend, Benfield Lainchbury.

While the pair has been together for the past seven years, they actually met when Campbell was seven years old as family friends. He has been one of her biggest supporters through most of her Olympic career, even enduring long distance love for 2½ years when she lived in Brisbane to train for Tokyo, and now again while she lives in Canberra.

“I feel very lucky to have someone who is so supportive of the career that is so demanding of myself and so demanding on our relationship and so demanding of him and he’s my absolute No.1 cheerleader and supporter,” she says.

“The big thing that changes if we get married is I have to plan a wedding as well, so I might have to give it time to get used to that idea. I don’t really have the space for it right now,” she says with a laugh.

Children also aren’t a priority for the swim star just yet. “I can barely look after myself, so we’ll see how we go if I can look after a child. Not this year, that’s for sure,” she jokes.

Whether kids will even be on the cards in the next four years is also up in the air, with the swimmer not entirely ruling out chasing Olympic glory again in Los Angeles in 2028.

While Paris was tipped to be her last games, she is well aware that modern advancements mean athletes can compete until much later in life. And with her now able to manage injuries better, there’s still a chance she could wear the green and gold one more time.

“Will I still want to do it by the time LA comes around – that’s the question. That’s really the big question,” she says.

“That’s what I asked myself after Tokyo, do I still really want to do this? The answer being yes meant that I came back to it.

“I might be at a slightly different phase in my life by then, we’ll see.”

If this is her last dance with the five rings and her farewell to the sport, however, she says she doesn’t want to be remembered for her record splits in the pool or places on the podium, but for her contribution to the team and the systematic changes she’s made to professional swimming.

Last year Campbell was part of the Australian Swimmers’ Association’s (ASA) historic deal to have athletes receive a share of Swimming Australia’s (SA) commercial revenue from sponsorship, broadcast rights and licensing.

The Memorandum of Understanding also allows swimmers to work collaboratively with SA to achieve greater financial sustainability for athletes. She also worked with ASA and SA to introduce the first pregnancy policy for female athletes, supporting swimmers through their pregnancy or adoption and their return to the sport; plus she was involved in ensuring there was an athlete on the board of Swimming Australia.

“My goal when I was president of ASA was to enhance every swimmer’s experience and that’s what I would like to be remembered for,” she says.

For now though, the grounded, yet fiercely competitive over-achiever has an Australian Olympic team to make at next week’s trials and a gold medal to win.