Cameron McEvoy

Cameron McEvoy’s brilliance can be traced back to a determination to be the most efficient as a seven-year-old. Sitting pool deck after his training at the Miami pool, a young Cameron watched Grant Hackett and Ian Thorpe, religiously learning from their stroke technique.

Cameron, the first Australian male swimmer to go to four Olympics, broke onto the swimming scene in 2011 at the Junior World Championships, where he won gold in the 50m freestyle and 100m freestyle, and a bronze in the 200m freestyle.

At 17, he joined his first Australian Olympic Team when he finished fifth in the 100m freestyle and sixth in the 200m freestyle at the 2012 nomination trials. He helped qualify the 4x100m and 4x200m freestyle relay teams for the finals at the Olympics before Australia went on to finish fourth and fifth respectively.

Four years later in Rio, Cameron claimed bronze as part of the 4x100m freestyle relay quartet, alongside James Magnussen, Kyle Chalmers and James Roberts.

Cameron anchored the team home, swimming over the Russians to claim third. His split of 47.00 was the second-fastest of all the swimmers, behind only Nathan Adrian of the United States. In his individual events, Cameron finished 7th in the 100m freestyle final in 48.12. He finished 11th in his 50m freestyle semi-finals in 21.89.

That same year he also made history by being the first man to claim the 50m, 100m and 200m freestyle national titles at the Australian National Championships.

At the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games Cameron claimed individual gold in the 50m freestyle and 100m freestyle, and bronze in the 50m freestyle. He was also a member of the gold-medal winning 4x100m freestyle relay team and 4x200m freestyle relay team.

A year later, at the 2019 World Championships, Cameron won bronze as a member of the 4x100m freestyle relay team.

In Tokyo 2020 he again finished with a bronze at the Olympics in the 4x100m freestyle relay. Following Tokyo, he then took an extended break from the pool and missed the 2022 World Championships and the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, travelling widely in Europe, all the while looking for new training techniques he could adopt.

Not surprisingly for one schooled in physics and mathematics at Griffith University, Cameron takes a very scientific approach to his swimming, experimenting constantly. It was with that approach in mind that he returned to the water at the Queensland championships, finishing second to Australian champion William Yang. He announced himself satisfied with his first 100m event since Tokyo, but also pleased that he had a new race to dissect on his journey to Paris 2024.

Cameron became the oldest Australian to win a swimming world championship event when he took out the 50m freestyle at the 2023 World Championships in Fukuoka, Japan. A time of 21.06 seconds broke a 14-year national record, as the 29-year-old capped a stunning resurgence.

He suffered the most agonising of near-misses when he attempted to defend the title at the 2024 Championships in Doha, edged for gold by just one-hundredth of a second by Ukraine's Vladyslav Bukhov.

But as a consolation, he picked up a surprise bronze medal in the 50m butterfly.

Cameron won gold in the 50m freestyle at the Australian Championships on the Gold Coast in April 2024 and at the Australian Swimming Trials in Brisbane in June - there in a time of 21.35.

In Paris Cameron's left-field training program paid off when 21.25 seconds of feverish, red-line racing crowned him an Olympic champion in the men’s 50m freestyle.

He became the first Australian male to win a medal in the event and, at the tender age of 30, the oldest Australian to ever win an individual gold in the pool.

“I got the result that you go after but it’s hard to explain the process after the past two years and the route I took to get here. For me, that definitely surpasses the 21 seconds tonight and getting the gold medal. That’s the tip of the iceberg,” Cameron said.

“That active creation over the past two years to start with not much of an idea, to developing something and seeing where it can go, with me as the guinea pig and seeing where it could take me.

“That’s something I will find very hard to replicate in my life and something I will be the most proud of forever.”