'A different person': How Tokyo heroics changed McKeon

Emma McKeon’s coach has noticed a subtle change in Australia’s most successful Olympian over the time that’s passed since her Tokyo Games heroics.

But the transformation Michael Bohl ponders poolside, at a low-key Sydney meet a handful of months out from the Paris Games, is not a case of an all-conquering athlete struggling to remain motivated.

“I think she’s a different person,” Bohl says of the superfish from Wollongong, chatting to Wide World of Sports for a story marking 100 days to go until the Paris Olympics opening ceremony.

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“No one can take away what she did in Tokyo. Fantastic results.”

McKeon will suit up at the Paris Games in July as a five-time Olympic gold medallist, having won a gold medal at Rio 2016 and four gold medals in Tokyo in 2021.

In the eyes of her veteran coach, her resounding success in Tokyo, coupled with the romance she’s sparked with Cody Simpson since, have made for a calmer and happier person, but whose top focus remains winning Olympic titles.

“She was at a stage in her life where she was single … and swimming was certainly her number one focus,” Bohl says.

“Swimming still is her number one focus, but she’s got a relationship now. Her and Cody are going out. They’re very serious about their relationship. So there’s that level of contentment, but I don’t see it drifting across to her attitude to training. She’s very focused on trying to position herself the best she can to try and secure places on that Olympic team.

“I think you’re happier when you’re in a relationship, and you’re a little bit more at peace as you’re getting older.

“She did a great job at the last Olympics — there’s contentment with that. There’s contentment with having a partner.”

McKeon and Simpson, the Australian popstar vying to become an Olympic swimmer in Paris, celebrated two years together this month.

They both train under Bohl at Griffith University’s Gold Coast campus.

“You can see them ending up together,” says Bohl, a coach and father figure to his athletes.

“They’re very much in love.

“That hasn’t taken away her wanting or her desire to achieve in the pool, but she seems just a little bit happier. Not that she was sad before, but when you have a partner who you just gel with it brings a little bit more stability.”

McKeon went close to quitting the sport after the Tokyo Olympics, which is understandable given her swag of gold medals, as well as the thousands of laps she had churned out since learning to swim as a young girl at the family-operated McKeon’s Swim School in the Illawarra.

What was driving McKeon, an athlete who had achieved everything she had ever hoped to achieve, as she locked in for another Olympic cycle? The crack-of-dawn wake-ups, thousands of laps, relentless hours in the gym, aching muscles, burning lungs, time on the physio table, and pressure-cooker showdowns with Sarah Sjostrom, Siobhan Haughey and the many superb Australian sprinters trying to hunt her down — she had lived and breathed it all, but wanted more.

McKeon took to the Tokyo Olympics searching for her first individual Olympic gold medal. When she left the pandemic-affected Games, she had two individual gold medals, having won the women’s 50m and 100m freestyle events.

‘A different person’: How Tokyo heroics changed McKeon

McKeon and Ian Thorpe both own five Olympic gold medals. A superior medal tally of 11 to nine gives McKeon the edge as Australia’s most decorated Olympian.

She’s all but certain to grab another gold medal in Paris as a relay swimmer. Whether she adds to her stash of individual gold medals is a tantalising prospect.

A few weeks after Bohl’s chat with WWOS, Australian Olympian Giaan Rooney, one of the star sprinters of the early 2000s, posed an intriguing question.

“Did you ever think that you’d say, ‘Emma McKeon came home from Tokyo with seven Olympic medals around her neck and as our most successful Olympian ever, yet three years later … the task ahead of her is monumental’?” Rooney said in a chat with WWOS, hinting at the meteoric rise of Australian sensation Mollie O’Callaghan.

“I think Emma is capable of individual Olympic gold, but I think her best money is the 50m free … The one to beat over the 100m free is Mollie, the one to beat over the 100m fly is Sarah Sjostrom, but I believe Emma has a real chance to defend her 50m free Olympic gold come Paris.”

“She’ll be an incredible part of many, many relays.

“But you also don’t ever write Emma off.”

O’Callaghan has been emphatic in usurping McKeon as Australia’s top athlete in the women’s 100m freestyle. The Ipswich prodigy won the world title in 2022 and retained her crown in 2023, exploding into Olympic gold medal favouritism after making a fleeting appearance in Tokyo as a 17-year-old relay swimmer.

A 20-year-old O’Callaghan will take on a 30-year-old McKeon at the Olympic trials in Brisbane in June, when Australia’s best swimmers flog themselves in pursuit of plane tickets to Paris.

Cate Campbell, who’s won Olympic gold medals on relay teams with McKeon, says you couldn’t pick it that she’s suddenly a hunter, rather than the hunted, and declared she shouldn’t feel any pressure to live up to anyone’s expectations in the twilight of her swimming career.

“She is someone who is so level all the time. It’s one of the things I admire most about her,” Campbell told WWOS, showering in praise the 2024 Young Australian of the Year.

“You can speak to her after a win or a loss and she sounds and looks exactly the same, and I think that is a real strength. She is coming into Paris with a huge spotlight on her, but she has this incredible ability to remain really true to herself and shrug off all the outside noise.

“For her, she has absolutely nothing else to prove to anyone, and I hope she’s coming into these Games not because she feels like she has to, but because she feels like she wants to.

“She’s our greatest-ever Olympic athlete and we should just be really happy that we’re getting to see her perform again.

“We’re watching history in the making when it comes to Emma.”