By: Ada Xin

Ariane Titmus, Australian swimming superstar, made a shocking announcement on the opening night of the national Olympic trials on June 13, 2023; she is thinking about retirement after the 2024 Paris games.

Aged 22, Titmus still hopes and expects to stay in the sport after the upcoming Olympics, but the thought of retirement is forming in her mind.

“With the intensity of my training and the intensity of having to perform on the world stage, I can’t think about anything else than the next 12 months,” she said. She also says she cannot think beyond Paris, though wants to continue the sport (Kids News, June 14, 2023).

Many people would be appalled or dismayed if Titmus quit the sport, because she has a once-in-a-generation talent.

She is the center of Australian swimming after winning the 200- and 400-meter freestyle gold medals at the Tokyo Olympics. She has beaten the famous American swimmer Katie Ledecky and has discussed retirement with her coach, Dean Boxall before her announcement at the nationals.

Titmus entered next month’s Japanese world championships without hesitation, showing no sign of wanting to stop. She entered a time of 3:58:47 for her 400-meter freestyle. Though she later admitted she was disappointed with the time, she says she wanted to go quicker in case it was one of her last attempts at the exhausting distance race.

“When you’re going into a meet like this, you always want to take an opportunity to swim as fast as you can and Dean and I had the conversation,” she said.

The “Terminator” still does not know what she wants to do after the Paris Olympics. She does “plan to continue, but you never know.”

Retirement would not be Titmus’s intention, but it all depends on how she performs at Paris. “I think if I went to Paris and won again, certainly (there might be) a motivational factor,” she says.

Titmus explains it is harder to keep training at the same level when you have fundamentally achieved everything you’ve wanted to achieve.