It takes a certain kind of bravery to give up the one thing you’ve always excelled at. Not because you didn’t succeed. Not because you were unable to make the choice due to an injury. When you honestly examined what remained to be proven, you discovered that there wasn’t much. A few elite swimmers have made that decision it sticks with you to watch them do it.
In 2013, Rebecca Adlington announced her retirement from competitive swimming at the age of 23. By then, she had won four Olympic medals, including two gold from Beijing 2008, shattering a nineteen-year world record held by the legendary Janet Evans. At that age, the majority of athletes are still learning how to get into big competitions. After becoming the first British woman to win two gold medals in swimming at the Olympics, Adlington realized with a clarity that most people never attain that she would not be able to build on what she had already accomplished.
Distance swimmers benefit from the sport in a unique way. In certain situations, the amount of training needed to complete 70,000 meters each week builds up in ways that shorter-distance competitors never fully encounter. Everything is absorbed by the body. The American icon Evans, whose record Adlington broke, won her first Olympic title at the age of sixteen and effectively ended her best competitive years by the age of twenty-five. At thirty-nine, a quiet comeback attempt failed to qualify for London 2012. It’s easy to read the lesson in that arc.
The narrative of Missy Franklin takes a different, depressing turn. When she arrived at the London Games in 2012 as a radiant seventeen years old and won four gold medals in one week, the swimming community treated her as though she would last forever. It didn’t. In 2016, Rio felt as though swimming had broken up with her due to severe shoulder pain that had taken away everything she had worked so hard to achieve. At twenty-three, she retired because, in her own words, she was afraid of how she would earn a living and what the rest of her life would entail.
Franklin and Adlington both independently and in different ways came to the conclusion that the identity an elite swimmer develops around competition is practically a different kind of injury to heal from. The friends who live in the same bubble, the early mornings the regimented days. Even when it ends voluntarily, it doesn’t go away quietly. It’s possible that no amount of planning can truly ease that departure; it may simply be one of those changes that must be experienced rather than controlled.
And yet. At twenty-three, Franklin, who is now a mother and podcast host, says her life has turned out better than she could have imagined. Adlington founded a foundation to promote swimming among youth and discovered what seems to be true fulfillment outside of the pool. It seems that swimmers who left early and made their own choices ended up in a more stable situation than those who waited for the sport to decide for them.
The question of what an athlete gains by continuing when there is nothing left to improve on was posed by 2004 Olympic bronze medallist Steve Parry in a straightforward manner that is difficult to dispute. The legacy has already been penned. The medals have already been won. It is more akin to avoidance than dedication to get up at five in the morning to train for an outcome that cannot improve what already exists.
From the outside, it is truly hard to comprehend what the swimmers who retired at the height of their abilities understood. Repetition does not enhance greatness once it has been attained. Sometimes stopping is the most courageous thing to do.