A tall, familiar figure is walking towards me near Bulimba Ferry on the south side of the Brisbane River. It is Cate Campbell, the Australian swimming legend who announced her retirement last June. She is carrying a slight limp. She assures me that walking is fine, as long as she stays on a hard surface, off the grass.
We set out along the boardwalk over the river’s edge. Scales of late afternoon light reflect off the brown snake, muddied by ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred. A darter fishes in the shallows, undeterred. “I like to be next to the water,” Campbell says with a quick, self-conscious giggle.
In a recent Instagram post, Campbell told her followers that after 20 years chasing the black line at the bottom of the pool, she was trying to work out where the water ended and she began. Retirement, she says, means “doing all the things I haven’t been able to do – like Friday night drinks, and the discovery that a weekend was two full days, instead of one and a half.”
In January, she and her partner took a skiing holiday at Mount Kenashi in Japan. He was an experienced snowboarder; she was a novice. As it turned out, it wasn’t for her. “Everyone says it’s good to step outside your comfort zone. I now have a little asterisk on that saying, rupturing your ACL [anterior cruciate ligament] also happens outside your comfort zone.”
Hence the limp. Campbell is now two months into a 12-month recovery, and not thrilled about it. “I was looking forward to not doing rehab exercises or spending time in physio clinics, and now I’m doing a lot of those. Except now I’m doing it on my own dime, whereas before I was inside a well-supported sporting institute and could access those facilities for free.”
If that sounds privileged, consider the price Campbell’s 32-year-old frame has paid for those 20 years in the water (she also had surgery on her left shoulder, last October). As the end of her career neared, she could see her teammates doing things she no longer could. “I’m hyper-aware of the aging of my body, and the toll that elite sport has taken on it.”
She wryly paints a picture from shortly after the knee surgery, when her limitations got the better of her. Stricken with cabin fever, she lurched out of the house, on crutches. “I hobbled down to the end of the street. My knee was too sore to keep going, and to add insult to injury, my shoulder was really sore from having to use the crutches.” She hobbled back.
When she announced her retirement, following a failed bid for last year’s Paris games at the Australian Olympic trials, she tallied up her career: over 35,000 kilometres, more than 19 million strokes, four Olympic Games, eight Olympic medals and seven world records. She still holds one of those world records – for the short-course 100 metres freestyle, set in 2017.
Campbell’s first Olympic appearance was at Beijing in 2008, when she was 16. Had she qualified, Paris 2024 would have been her fifth Olympiad – something no Australian swimmer has ever achieved. She admits there was relief when it was all over. “I was so tired by the time we got to those trials, and my body had been breaking down continuously.”
There is a curious suspension of disbelief involved in elite sport. Athletes have to mentally back themselves to perform, even when every fibre of their being is telling them: enough. Physically, Campbell was cooked. Yet she still willed herself back into the water, as though spitting in the face of her sporting mortality.
She likens it to a delusion, but that’s not so unusual, she says: “We all have to lie to ourselves, all the time, to continue to move through the world. If we truly understood the risks of walking out your front door, you wouldn’t do it. And if you set yourself big, ambitious goals, they require imagination. Imagination is a form of delusion, right?”
We pause for a moment. Campbell reminds me , matter-of-factly, “I never reached the pinnacle of my sport.” She is regarded as one of Australia’s greatest relay swimmers, with four gold medals, one silver and one bronze, and she has a tray full of World Championship records. But an individual Olympic gold medal eluded her to the end.
It kept her hungry. Does it still burn? “Oh, I think that you can look back with regret, and not let that regret tarnish your whole experience. I think people who have no regrets in life haven’t lived exciting enough lives … I’m not going to define my whole career by not having that in my trophy cabinet.”
Besides, she says, the view might have looked different from the summit. “I’ve obviously seen and spoken to a lot of people who have – and sometimes it isn’t everything they hoped or dreamed for, or the emotions aren’t what they expect.”
Campbell hardly presents as a fish out of water. She is relaxed and confident. She is studying an Australian Institute of Company Directors course, and is already a regular on the speaker’s circuit.
A career in sports media would be the easy route, and is hers if she wants it; she loves the idea of “bringing athlete’s stories into people’s living rooms”.
But not now, not yet, not while she is trying to disentangle herself from her old life and establishing a new one. Asked if she is in any hurry, her answer is a crisp, one-word “No”.
Some habits die hard, though. Having lived her life with military discipline, she still needs structure. After swearing she would never set an alarm again once she retired, she still gets up at 5.30am every morning. She reads, plays a little piano – something she’s just taken up – then does her rehab exercises, before turning her attention to the day ahead.
We’re back at the ferry terminal now. Commuters are rushing past, not seeing us, thinking only of home. I ask Campbell about hyperfocus. “I don’t have anything to hyperfocus on now, which is interesting, because it’s probably close to the first time in my life that I don’t have something to aim for.”
And with that, she sounds free. “We always tell athletes to separate the person from their performances, but the nature of high-performance and elite sport is all-encompassing, so of course your identities are going to merge. I think a lot of athletes get to the end of their career and they berate themselves for not feeling like they’re accomplishing or achieving anything.
“I am giving myself grace in terms of being able to unpick that, instead of berating myself for that real loss of purpose and identity. But also, I’m really proud of what I’ve managed to achieve. That will always be part of me.”
First published in the Guardian, 5 April 2025