Emma McKeon on training for Paris: ‘Your head makes or breaks you’

When Emma McKeon was 15, she represented Australia at the FINA Short Course Championship in Dubai, and failed to place. It was her first taste of losing on the global stage, and she didn’t like it.

“I was putting too much pressure on myself,” she says, as matter-of-factly as if she was describing swapping her cereal for oats, surely a sign of someone who has done the hard yards of self-reflection, so necessary for an athlete of her calibre. “I didn’t enjoy it. I had come from having no pressure, going to a meet and enjoying time with my friends, to going to this senior athletic team and suddenly feeling this burden to perform at a very high level.” As a lifelong perfectionist, McKeon decided to leave swimming.