Diving in for her Olympic debut at Odaiba Marine Park, the 27-year-old's claimed bronze in a scorching time of 1:59:32.5.

Lee punched her ticket to Tokyo after placing seventh in the Women’s 10km event at the 2019 World Swimming Championships in South Korea.

As the first swimmer officially selected for the Australian Olympic Team in July 2019, it’s been a long wait for the 27-year-old to pull on the green and gold.

She finished just 1.7 seconds behind Brazil’s gold medal winner Ana Marcela Cunha and 0.9 seconds behind silver medallist Sharon van Rouwendaal from the Netherlands.

Before today, Melissa Gorman’s 10th place finish at London 2012 was the highest an Australian had achieved in Marathon Swimming at the Olympic Games.

Speaking post-race Lee was thrilled with her performance.

“I don’t even think I’ve really processed how it feels, it’s just incredible, it was the goal going in to come out with a medal and doing it at my first Olympics is just insane,” Lee said.

The race didn’t come without its surprises, including a local fish who made a special appearance.

“It jumped up and hit me in the face and I didn’t know what it was at first. I was watching them jump out before, but I didn’t think it would actually hit me.” 

Despite calm water conditions it was still a tough race with high water temperatures.

“We were expecting the water temperature to be around 31 degrees, so I’d been training in a pool that was 31 degrees.

“Then the last couple of weeks I went to Darwin, which is similar air temperature to here, so that’s how I prepared coming in.

"Here it was only around 29.3 degrees I think so that was a little bit of a bonus it being a little bit cooler.

“But I made sure I got plenty of hydration at the start of the race when it was a bit easier to feed and I think that it all paid off.”

Next up for the Aussie’s in the marathon swimming is Kai Edwards who will compete in the Men’s 10km event on Thursday morning at 6:30am local time (7:30am AEST).

Sarah Dyce

#HaveAGo at Swimming