Tatjana Smith ends two-year retirement and returns to swimming after 2024 Paris gold

Tatjana Smith, South Africa's most successful Olympian, has ended a two-year retirement and returned to competitive swimming after stepping away following the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, saying she had at one point "lost the love" for the sport.

Smith, 29, won 200m breaststroke gold in Paris and previously took 100m breaststroke gold at Tokyo 2020, leaving her with four Olympic medals—a total matched for South Africa only by Chad le Clos—and she described feeling burned out and robotic in the lead-up to her 2024 retirement. "My whole life, I was kind of a robot towards swimming," she told Newsday on the BBC World Service, adding that the timing of her decision felt right to her despite others' views: "I think probably everyone would think that the timing [of retirement] was the worst. But I absolutely 100% believe it was the best decision at that time, and I still have so much peace about it."

Financial pressures and disputes also influenced Smith's choice to step away, with the swimmer saying, "The financial burden on any athlete is so tough," and recounting that she "relied on my parents funding me until I broke the world record at the Olympics." She highlighted sponsorship dynamics and institutional shortcomings as additional strains: "But the majority of sponsorships for athletes are based on performance. So then you have that pressure and expectation to always have to perform, otherwise you're not going to get paid," and "I think the financial side, and also being in a system where they're not really putting the athletes first, made it really difficult."

Smith changed her surname from Schoenmaker after marrying sports agent Joel Smith in November 2023, a union the article notes connects her by marriage to the wider South African sporting scene through her sister-in-law Rachel Smith. She acknowledged family planning as part of her thinking about retirement, saying, "Thinking about families as a woman, you have to time it perfectly, because if you're pregnant, it's not like you can still compete." The 2023 200m breaststroke world champion also referenced the emotional toll after the Games: "It was such an emptiness in my life, because my whole life revolved around swimming."

During her time away Smith took on speaking engagements to earn income despite disliking public appearances—"I hate public speaking. I hate being in front of people."—and experimented with triathlon before rediscovering her passion in the pool. Describing the return to swimming, she said: "Every time I went back to the swimming pool and I dived in, I was like, 'Yeah, this is a feeling that I really miss so much'," and added, "I think slowly over the year and a half, I just realised 'Wow, I really do love swimming'."

On deciding to resume competition Smith said she wants to "try something new" by focusing on the 50m breaststroke, an event the article states has been added to the Olympic programme for the first time ahead of the 2028 Games. She framed the shift as a physical and tactical change, explaining training alterations: she has reduced sessions from eight to three per week and moved from daily 12km workloads to "12km over a whole week," noting, "I have 20 years of endurance in my pocket, but I can definitely see I don't have those fast twitch [muscle] fibres. It's a whole different way of teaching my body how to swim."

Smith portrayed her comeback as a personal choice made on her own terms after achieving more than she expected in the sport: "For the first time, it's my decision whether I want to come back. I'm choosing swimming. I've achieved way more than I ever dreamed in my whole life, so I have nothing to prove."

She has committed to the 50m breaststroke as her next competitive target, aiming to re-establish herself in a shorter, more explosive event that has been added to the Olympic schedule for 2028.