Emma McKeon’s new mission to help kids through UNICEF and back home in Australia
The swimming champion has revealed a completely different side to her out of the pool, as she sets out on new missions to save lives overseas and help young Aussies.
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Exclusive: She’s Australia’s greatest Olympian, but now swimmer Emma McKeon is making a splash in Bangladesh, where she is hoping to save lives by encouraging kids to learn how to swim.
The 30 year old, who retired from elite sport in November, has just returned from the South Asian country, which she visited as a UNICEF Australia ambassador.
At times it was confronting; she met kids living in slums and child brides in the world’s largest refugee camp.
But where she felt most at home was in the water with the children.
McKeon visited two swim programs set up by the charity to help reduce the shocking number of child drownings that occur there; 40 die every day.
She said seeing the conditions the children were learning to swim – within a bamboo structure in a muddy pond – was eye opening.
“Seeing it in real life and seeing the kids get in there … yeah, it is a shock,” she said.
“In Australia we are so lucky, everyone has the opportunity to learn how to swim. Here they learn in ponds, that is nothing like the pools we swim in.”
In one village McKeon met the grieving parents of two-year-old Abu Sufiyan, who tragically drowned in the family pond, a few steps from his back door.
McKeon also jumped in the surf with a group of girls who were learning to swim and surf.
Like her parents, who have a swim school and still live in her hometown of Wollongong, McKeon believes “one life lost is one too many” and the statistic of 40 children dying a day needs to change.
Back home, she also hopes to help young Aussies.
She is currently working on a new goal-setting program for kids which she hopes will be rolled out in classrooms around the country.
The swimming champ, who has 14 Olympic medals, six of them gold, said she learnt about goal setting through sport and it was a fantastic skill to have.
“I want to create a goal setting program for kids and teenagers and I guess show the way that I’ve set goals and what I’ve worked out and the lessons I’ve learnt, to stick to the goals and dreams that I’ve had,” McKeon said.
She said her program wasn’t just about long-term goals, but short term ones, such as getting a certain mark in a maths test or learning to play a song on the guitar.
“It’s a life skill to be able to set goals for yourself and stick to them and work out the process of getting there,” McKeon said.
McKeon, who now lives on the Gold Coast with her boyfriend 27-year-old Cody Simpson, a popster, turned competitive swimmer, turned actor, will no doubt also be supporting his Australian theatre debut in Opera Australia’s new production of Guys & Dolls on Sydney Harbour next month.
He was also in Paris for the Olympics last year to watch McKeon win a gold, silver and a bronze.
While their Instagram accounts show they’re totally loved up, McKeon declined to say whether she wanted a family of her own one day, saying she wanted to keep the focus on the great work of UNICEF.
“It definitely makes you so grateful for what we have here, but it just makes me really even more passionate about being able to help these children,” she said.
To read the full story see the magazine. To support UNICEF’S efforts in Bangladesh donate here: unicef.org.au/emma
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Originally published as Emma McKeon’s new mission to help kids through UNICEF and back home in Australia
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