Olympic freestyle swimmer Ariarne Titmus announced her immediate retirement in an Instagram post dedicated to her seven-year-old self this morning.
In the video posted, Titmus said it was time to step away from competitive swimming.
“A tough one, a really tough one, but one that I’m really happy with,” she said.
The 25-year-old represented Australia at two Olympics, her last one being the 2024 Paris Olympics where she won two gold, and two silver medals.
Titmus decided to take a break from competitive swimming after the Paris games before announcing her retirement.
“I’ve always loved swimming. It’s been my passion since I was a little girl,” she said.
“But I guess I’ve taken this time away from the sport and realised some things in my life that have always been important to me are just a little bit more important to me now than swimming.”
She made her Olympic debut for Australia at the 2020 Tokyo games (the meet happened in 2021 due to Covid-19), winning a gold, silver and bronze medal.
Titmus broke the 400m freestyle world record twice over the course of her career. Her personal best of 3:55.38 was beaten by Canada’s Summer McIntosh by 1.20 seconds in June this year.
The Tassie-born swimmer won eight Commonwealth Games medals across the 2022 Birmingham and 2018 Gold Coast games, seven of which were gold.
She also won nine world championship medals, including four gold.
Earlier this year, she was nominated for the Laureus World Comeback of the Year award for her performances at the Paris Olympics. Her four medals at the games came after she recovered from surgery to remove an ovarian tumour.
Titmus describes her health scare as a “turning point” and the start of her reassessing her career.
“It probably was the first time where I considered some things outside of swimming,” she said.
“I’ve always had goals in my personal life, but swimming has always been most important up until this point and I’ve just realised that those goals and what I want in my future is now more important to me.”
Photo: by Sergio Calvo is available HERE and used under a Creative Commons licence. The image has not been modified.
