Kyle Chalmers, Australia’s biggest male swimming star, said the 2024 Paris Olympics will likely be his final Games, but he plans to compete beyond that even if he doesn’t go all the way to 2028.
“Probably will be the last Olympics, definitely for me,” Chalmers said on SEN 1170 Breakfast, an Australian radio show. “I’m definitely the old man in the marshalling room now.
“I’ll be old and probably ready to start the next chapter of my life, so we’ll see what happens.”
Chalmers, 25, later clarified that he isn’t planning to retire next year.
“There are many competitions after the Olympics that still give me the opportunity to represent my country at the highest level,” he posted. “We have a world championships short course in 2024, world championship long course in 2025, commonwealth games in 2026 and plenty of world cups in there also. I’ll be busy, I have plenty of titles that need defending.. 😉 But yes Paris will be my third and most likely last Olympic Games. 2028 is a very long way away,, but who knows, if the body and the mind hold up maybe I’ll even be in Brisbane in 2032.”
Chalmers won the 100m freestyle at the world championships on July 27, seven years after his other individual global title in the 100m free at the Rio Olympics.
He became the oldest man to win a world title in the event since 2007.
Come the 2028 Olympics, Chalmers will be 30, older than any individual Australian swimming medalist since 1924, according to Olympedia.org.
Chalmers is the latest in a line of Australian sprint stars, following Eamon Sullivan, James Magnussen and Cameron McEvoy.
In 2016, he finished second to McEvoy in the 100m free at the Australian trials, then won the Olympic 100m free by two tenths of a second.
He became the youngest man to win an Olympic swimming gold medal since countryman Ian Thorpe at the 2000 Sydney Games.
Chalmers also took 100m free silver at the 2019 Worlds and Tokyo Olympics behind American Caeleb Dressel among his 18 combined Olympic and world medals.
In between his individual golds in Rio and last month, Chalmers underwent two heart surgeries for an elevated-heart-rate condition and said his mental health reached “rock bottom” last year.
Since, he began defining himself “a lot more than just Kyle Chalmers the swimmer,” he said at worlds. “Two days a week I’m laboring on a building site.”
