By: Violet Yan
An article in The New York Times written on June 17, 2022, confirmed that the world’s best swimmer, Ariarne Titmus, won’t be going to Worlds in Budapest because she simply doesn’t feel like she needs to be there.
Titmus was born in Launceston in Tasmania and swam from a young age. Her family always had backyard pools. When the Australian swimmers Stephanie Rice and Libby Trickett competed in the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Titmus was mesmerized by the TV..
The hugely-populated (half a million) Tasmania lacked swimming facilities and coaches that talented swimmers needed to reach an elite level. Titmus’s parents suggested relocating to support her career, but Titmus resisted. She enjoyed her friends and her school, but Titmus experienced a realization after being selected for the Australian junior world championship squad in 2015. Titmus decided she had to pursue her dream, so she learned to swim on her own at a public pool while listening to the directions of a distant coach who texted her a plan for each training session.
Within weeks, Titmus’s family had relocated to Brisbane. There, Titmus steadily closed the gap with Katie Ledecky, an Olympic champion. “When we first came together, Arnie was 38 seconds off Ledecky in the 800-meter freestyle, she was 16 seconds off Ledecky in the 400 and she was eight seconds off Ledecky in the 200,” said Dean Boxall, Titmus’s coach. “We never thought about the Olympics. We were getting on that journey and making sure she was getting better and better.”
She first became famous at the 2019 worlds, when she beat Ledecky, a 15-time world champion and the three-time defending champion in the 400-meter freestyle. Two years later, Titmus established her reputation as the best middle-distance swimmer in the world at last summer’s Tokyo Olympics, beating Ledecky to gold medals in the 200- and 400-meter freestyle events and adding an individual silver and a relay bronze to her medal haul.
Despite breaking the world record, being the best form of her career, and the hope of a showdown with Ledecky of the USA, Titmus will skip the year’s most important international swimming competition. “ I really don’t care — it doesn’t bother me that I’m not going to be in the headlines or the media or the spotlight when the world championships are on. That’s not why I swim. I swim because I love it and I want to perform on the biggest stage, which for me is the Olympic Games,” she said.
Link: The New York Times