Kim Wilson
For most of her adult life, Emma McKeon could tell you with remarkable accuracy where she would be months, even years, ahead. Every day was arranged: swim, eat, recover, sleep, repeat. There was always somewhere she needed to be and a clock measuring how quickly she could get there.
Now, at 32, Australia’s most decorated Olympian sometimes doesn’t know what she’ll be doing next week. “It’s great, but also unsettling,” she says.
McKeon retired from competitive swimming in November 2024, three months after her third Olympic Games, ending a career that delivered an extraordinary 14 Olympic medals, including six golds.
The quietly spoken swimmer from Wollongong had been contemplating life beyond the pool for some time. Ahead of the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, uncertain even then how much longer she could compete, she finished a degree in public health she’d been pursuing alongside her swimming. By the time Paris 2024 was over, McKeon was ready for something beyond the relentless cycle of training, recovery and competition.
But what comes after so many years of discipline and adrenalin is a question McKeon is still answering. “There’s always another meet or another season or another big goal,” she says of life as an elite athlete. “It’s always kind of, ‘What’s next?’ So when you suddenly stop, and there’s no obvious next target, it takes a bit of getting used to.”
There have been other endings in McKeon’s life, too. Earlier this year it became public that she and former competitive swimmer and musician Cody Simpson had separated after four years together. The pair, who met through swimming and shared a home on the Gold Coast, had been one of Australian sport’s most recognisable couples. Reports at the time described the split as amicable.
McKeon has not publicly dissected the relationship since and prefers not to say whether she is dating again. Asked instead how she has navigated the more intrusive side of having a public profile, she returns, characteristically, to the people she trusts. “It’s challenging, but I think I’m very good at sticking to my values and also just sticking with the people I know care about me – my closest friends and definitely my family.”
The split may still be relatively fresh, but McKeon does not sound like someone retreating from the world because of it. Asked whether the experience has made her more guarded or protective of her private life, she says no, adding she has always maintained boundaries around what she shares. Rather than closing herself off, she seems secure in knowing where those boundaries lie. “I am so strong on my values, and I never change from that,” she says. “That gives me a feeling of security.”
There is a quiet confidence in the way McKeon talks about this new chapter. But not certainty, because uncertainty is what she is learning to accommodate. It’s more an awareness and determination to only surround herself with people who are aligned with her values.
For someone whose professional existence was once measured in fractions of a second, McKeon’s new pleasures can sound almost defiantly ordinary: mornings enjoying a coffee she doesn’t have to rush; calling a friend and suggesting a walk tomorrow without consulting a training schedule first. “Slowing down a bit has been good,” she says. “Even though I’ve had a non-stop year, it still feels like slowing down because it’s not all-consuming.”
“Swimming gave me so much, and shaped me into the person I am. But I don’t miss it.”
EMMA McKEON
After finishing school, McKeon moved from Wollongong to Queensland, living first in Brisbane and then for much of her swimming career on the Gold Coast. These days, to be closer to her parents, siblings and childhood friends, she splits her time between Sydney and Wollongong. “I haven’t lived close to my best friends since high school,” she says.
That didn’t stop some of those friends travelling to Paris to watch McKeon’s final Olympics. “They’ve been there for all my big swimming things, and now I can be back close to them and not miss any of their big milestones either.”
Another drawcard is her niece Sophie, now six months old. McKeon has even found herself back in the pool for Sophie’s swimming lessons, an environment that must feel both completely familiar and utterly transformed. But while McKeon still swims occasionally with her mother and brother, there is no great yearning for the black line on the bottom of the pool.
That has come as something of a surprise. “Swimming gave me so much, and shaped me into the person I am,” she says. “But I don’t miss it. Sport moulds you, but it is a short period of your life and there’s so much more to come afterwards.”
McKeon appears determined to discover exactly what that “more” might contain, and her approach has been deliberately expansive – say yes, try things, see what sticks.
One of those things has been working with Channel Seven’s Sunrise, discovering an unexpected enjoyment in telling sporting stories from the other side of the camera. What interests her isn’t simply telling us who won but using her experience to “share the athlete perspective and tell athlete stories”.
McKeon has also completed a four-day Business of Media, Entertainment and Sport course at Harvard University, where her classmates included people from entertainment and broadcasting, an NBA player, an NFL player and other athletes contemplating or navigating life beyond sport.
One piece of advice from the course stayed with her particularly strongly: “The next thing you do doesn’t have to be the thing.” For someone who’s spent a lifetime pursuing one thing with extraordinary singularity, there is something liberating in the idea that “you kind of just evolve as you go”.
A natural extension of that curiosity is her longstanding interest in health, which dovetails with her work with UNICEF and the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation. “Being able to use the platform that I’ve got from sport for good has always been something I’ve really wanted to do,” she says.
Commercial partnerships, such as her work as a brand ambassador with Miele, are framed less around performance these days and more around the business of creating a life and home outside elite sport. But McKeon has not entirely abandoned the part of herself that needs a physical challenge. On August 30, she plans to run the Sydney Marathon. This is funny to McKeon because, as she repeatedly points out, laughing, swimmers “seriously do not run – we’re not good at it”.
At first, McKeon had no interest in running 42.195 kilometres. Then she reconsidered. “This year for me is about saying yes to everything – exploring what I love and what I want to do, and challenging myself.” The marathon, she adds, has become a way of “reminding myself how tough I am, and how tough I can be”.
With Sydney Marathon head coach Ben Lucas helping her navigate the distance, McKeon plans to run alongside former tennis champion Ash Barty and Barty’s sister Ali. There is no target time, perhaps the most convincing evidence yet that McKeon has retired.
For an athlete whose career was defined by being faster than almost everyone else on Earth, on this occasion simply getting through it will be victory enough. “I literally just want to finish it,” she says. “I’ll be stoked to finish.”
It is all part of the process of separating “Emma the person” from “Emma the Olympian”, a transition she admits hasn’t always been comfortable. “At first I was definitely a bit lost. I didn’t know what to do with my time.”
As she makes the transition, McKeon is still busy, but it is a different kind of busy now – less relentless and singular in its focus. There is time to travel for pleasure, to celebrate family milestones, to do work that interests her and to support causes she cares about. There is room to wonder rather than know.
“I keep reminding myself, ‘You don’t know what you’re going to be doing in 12 months. Enjoy this time of just exploring and slowing down.’ I’ve never really had that before.”
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