FRIDAY FLASHBACK: Emma McKeon
This week, Australia’s most successful Olympian announced her retirement. Read HER WAY’s 2022 chat with the superstar swimmer.
Emma McKeon this week confirmed her competitive swimming days had come to an end. The 30yr old capped off a stellar career with a sixth career Olympic gold medal in Paris, the most ever by an Australian, and was earlier this year named the Young Australian of the Year for her work in the pool as much as her charity work with UNICEF.
Earlier this year covering a swimming event which Emma was competing at, I chatted with one of the meet’s officials. He recalled having seen Emma at the event for many years, and told me the story of how the star gave a young fan a gold medal she had won at the meet, recognising that such a gesture could make such a huge impact on the next generation.
This interview with Emma was from November 2022. I had already met her a couple of times by this stage, and despite knowing her to be softly spoken, humble and approachable from our other conversations, I still found myself nervous in the lead up to this chat. As Emma makes clear in this interview, she is just a human like all of us… she just happens to be one of the greatest athletes Australia has ever produced.
Emma grew up in the New South Wales coastal town of Wollongong, and her parents still live there, along with the family dog Jax. Emma tells me that she misses Jax when she's away training and competing, and can't wait to see him at Christmas when she returns home. Swimming is in the family's blood - Emma's dad Ron went to two Olympics and won four Commonwealth Gold medals, while her uncle Rob Woodhouse was also a two-time Olympian, winning a bronze medal. Her older brother David was also an Olympian - the two siblings went to the 2016 Rio Games together (the first Australian brother and sister to compete at the same Olympics in over fifty years). Emma's mum Susie also represented Australia at the Commonwealth Games. But despite having a family of swimming role models, it was another Susie that inspired Emma in her own swimming journey.
"I was five when the Sydney 2000 Olympics were on, and I don't really remember much of it, but I just remember Susie O'Neill. I don't think I even watched her or saw her race... I might have seen her on TV, and I got to meet her through my uncle as well, so I just idolised her from a young age. I didn't really understand what the Olympics were, because I was only five. And then when it got to the 2004 Olympics in Athens, and I watched those on TV because I was a bit older, I got to understand what the Olympics were a bit more, and I got to understand that my parents were both swimmers as well. So that, and watching other athletes doing amazing things on TV, made me want to do that when I grew up."
Despite her swimming DNA, like most kids, Emma had a go at a lot of sports when she was young.
"I did a bit of everything. I did dancing and basketball. Through school I did a bit of netball, touch football... I tried a bit of everything. I loved doing high jump, and I went back to my old school last week, and they said I still have the 13 year old's high jump record at school, which was surprising!"
I wondered if having parents and an uncle who had swum at the highest level was ever intimidating for Emma when she was young, or whether she ever felt pressure within herself to reach that same level?
"It was never intimidating. It was more just they both supported my sister, me and my brother in whatever we wanted to do. In terms of swimming, they started a swim school, and just wanted us to learn how to swim so we could be safe in the water. As we progressed, they were just big supports because they'd been there before, and as I got older and was going through all the different competitions and training, they were able to support me really well because they'd been there and done it and understood it and knew what I'd be going through at different points. I think that's been the biggest help for me."
As part of my research for the interview, I spoke to a long time family friend of the McKeon's, and they described Emma to me as,
"an overachiever, but down to earth and downplayed everything", and that she is "extremely humble".
I asked Emma what helped her to stay so grounded, particularly in younger years when she started to dominate state and national titles.
"I think because I know that swimming is something that I do, and it's not who I am, and it doesn't make me a better person than anyone else, and who you are as a person is what matters more."
While she's humble, Emma balances it with a confidence. How does she deal with those two qualities, which in some ways are quite opposite?
"I think the confident side is believing in the hard work you've done and believing that you're capable of winning and doing your best on that day, and the humble side is - no matter how you go, good or bad, that's separate from who you are. So I think just knowing and believing that keeps a good balance."
Growing up around swimming pools, and to now be an elite swimmer in her late twenties, is a long time to be doing something if you don't love it. While Emma definitely loves what she does, there have been times during the journey when she's questioned whether swimming was the right thing for her;
"During my teenage years I stopped and started a lot, because I wasn't sure if I wanted to do it. I started to put too much pressure on myself, and then that made me not enjoy it. When I came back to the sport, it kind of taught me that I have to enjoy what I'm doing first. It taught me to put a better balance between the pressure and the enjoyment side of things. So that made me enjoy it more, and that's got me to where I am now and it's got me to keep swimming for this long as well.
I guess what I enjoy about it - I love challenging myself, and working towards a big goal that I'm passionate about and believe in. I also love all my friends and the team I have around me everyday, and I love all the opportunities it's given me, and the lessons. There's a lot of highs and lows, and there's a lot of lessons you learn that you can take with you forever."
Away from the pool, Emma's two favourite ways to spend time are two extreme opposites - trekking around the world, or being close to home.
"When I'm training, there's not a lot of time to do the things I love - I love travelling, I love being home at Wollongong with my dog. When I'm not training, I love going down to Lake Conjola, where my parents have a beach house, and I love relaxing and going down to the beach."
While she's in training mode, she keeps it simple in terms of how she uses her spare time, with reading, beach walks and cafes her favourite ways to relax.
Emma missed selection for the 2012 Olympics in London. It was then, while still in high school, that she decided to take a break from swimming . It gave her the opportunity to do some of the things she'd previously been missing out on, but as she told me, she soon realised she actually wasn't missing much at all.
"Social things after school - those were things that I thought I was missing out on when I was swimming. If people were organising something at school to do that weekend, I'd often have to say no because I had training that night or I had a meet in Sydney on the weekend, so I couldn't go to a party or things like that. So when I stopped swimming, I could do those things, but I realised I wasn't missing out on a lot, even though it was nice to be able to do those things with my friends."
Ultimately, the urge to compete and achieve the goals she had set herself, led Emma back to competitive swimming.
"Having that drive, and that big thing that you're working towards and you're passionate about - I think that's what I missed. And I missed my friends from swimming as well, because I was used to seeing them every day, sometimes twice a day. Also, I didn't want to keep going with my life and get to a point where it was too late for me to go back to swimming and regret not doing it and regret missing out on that opportunity of doing something I was really good at and did love... and I did love it, I was just focussing too much on the parts of it I didn't like, which was the pressure I was putting on myself and the social things."
Being from of a family of elite swimmers was never going to guarantee that Emma would be successful, and definitely not to the extent where she is the most successful Australian Olympian of all time. While it's not easy to extract an answer from someone so humble, I ask Emma why she thinks she has had so much success. After a long, thoughtful pause, she responds.
"I'd say it's the hard work - having a hard work ethic, and working on something every day, week after week, and year after year - because it didn't just suddenly happen for me, it's putting in consistent hard work for five or six years."
During her swimming career, Emma has broken several World Records, and is currently the Olympic Record holder for both the 50m and 100m Freestyle events, both of which she achieved at Tokyo last year. While most swimmers would not know exactly how fast they have swum until they touch the wall and look at the clock, I asked Emma if she can tell if she's swimming particularly fast, and what feeling is like.
"Honestly, the fastest races feel the easiest. Sometimes I've swum my fastest while not going 100%, like in heats."
When I first met Emma earlier this year, I asked if she had a favourite medal out of her extensive collection. At the time, she told me it was the 100m Freestyle Olympic gold medal from Tokyo 2021, as it was her first individual Olympic gold medal, and one that she had set her "eye and heart set on for such a long time and something I'd dreamt of since I was a little girl, so to finally do that and pull it off in a high pressure situation, that's definitely something that means a lot to me."
Having won relay gold medals, Emma had wanted to stand on top of that Olympic podium alone, and although a mask covered much of her face, her smile could not be contained. Having dreamt of achieving that goal since she was a little girl, what was the feeling in that moment compared to how she imagined it might feel?
"I remember thinking that I was proud that I could pull it off, because I really believed that I could win. I've said this before, but I believed that I COULD win, not that I WOULD win. You can't go into a race knowing you'll win, it's just knowing you're capable of winning. So that's the mental space I wanted to be in going into the race. I think when I stood on the podium and had the medal around my neck, I was just so happy that I'd actually pulled it off, and also thinking about my family back home who were in lockdown at the time, and imagining them celebrating with me (I'd FaceTimed them between the race and the medal presentation). Then also thinking about all the people who had helped me to get to that point - my coach, the whole team, my sports scientist, my physio and everyone. It was a big team effort."
One of the most obvious questions you can ask an Olympic medallist is where they keep their medals. Since Emma has so many of them, I was genuinely curious where she stores them, and if there is any kind of order to them.
"Each 'meet' is altogether, but my Olympic ones... I actually don't know where they are right now... they're in Wollongong. Before Tokyo, I had the Rio (2016 Olympics) ones under the stairs in... I had this, like, toy pram when I was little, and the pram was still stored under the stairs, so for some reason they sat in that. When I got back from Tokyo, I was taking them out a lot to show people and take to events, so they were just in a shopping bag, and I think they're still in that."
Away from the pool, Emma is also qualified in the area of health and nutrition, having completed a university Bachelor's Degree in 2019 at Griffith University. Olympic champion, university graduate, a humble person - I had to ask Emma if there is something she's not good at. "It'd have to be cooking, but I'm working on it."
Emma's amazing efforts in Tokyo saw her claim the equal most ever medals by a woman at a single Olympics, and overtook legends Ian Thorpe and Leisel Jones for the most medals ever by an Australian Olympian. On top of that, at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham she won six gold medals, for a career total of 14, the most in the history of the event. For someone who is driven by having goals to accomplish, what is there left for Emma to achieve? What keeps her going back to the pool for the early morning training sessions?
"I love it, and I feel like I can still improve. I have achieved what I wanted to achieve, and probably even more than I expected in Tokyo."
Australia has a great group of sprint swimmers at the moment, including World Champion Mollie O'Callaghan, and Shayna Jack, but Emma isn't quite done yet.
"I think it's just probably the belief that I think I can still go faster, and so I just want to challenge myself to that, and finish swimming by doing everything that I possibly could, and gone as fast as I could, and just see what I'm capable of."