Australian swim king Kyle Chalmers yesterday said the Paris Olympics will be his third and last, but the sprint star insisted it did not mean he was retiring. The 25-year-old scorched the field to win 100m freestyle gold at the world championships in Japan last month, bagging the one medal that had long eluded him.
It gave him the full set, having also achieved the feat at the Olympic, Commonwealth and world short-course level.
“It will be the last Olympics for me, definitely,” he told SEN sports radio.
“I’ll be 26 next year, and even this year, when I was in the marshalling room, I was the oldest in my race by a long margin.
“There are guys that were born in 2003 or 2004 that are there now. I’ll be old and ready to start the next chapter of my life.” His comments were widely interpreted in Australia as calling it quits altogether, but Chalmers later took to Instagram to clarify this was not the case.
“I am not retiring! The quote was ‘It will be my last Olympics’,” he said.
“There are many competitions after the Olympics that still give me the opportunity to represent my country at the highest level.
“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. ” (AFP)
