This time last year I could not look at a diving board without my stomach turning. Right now I am falling back in love with the sport I have given my life to. This is how I got here.
I had been struggling with diving for the whole year after Paris. From the outside you would not have known. I opened the season with World Cup bronze in Mexico, the first time the team had competed since the Games, and I stood on that podium genuinely proud of the diver I still was. But a medal around your neck does not always match what is happening inside you. I reached a really low point around the World Cup series and the nationals that followed, just as I had to start preparing for the World Championships.
I was not getting anywhere in training, and emotionally I was at a really low level. I was losing sleep, my appetite had gone, and everything felt like a task. Waking up in the morning felt as hard as the diving itself. I just knew that staying on that trajectory was going to do me long-term harm.
Taking a break was a genuinely scary thing. In an elite environment you feel like stepping back is the same as failing. But the moment I said it out loud, I cannot keep pushing myself to this limit, it is doing me real damage, everyone around me supported me. I felt like I could breathe again. I had not realised how much pressure, or really how much terror, I had been carrying in my shoulders and in my body.
I love days off. I am lazy to my core. But this was something bigger, because it meant stepping back from the sport itself, and that is something I had never really done. I went in without expectations, as open as I could be, and I think that openness was the whole point. All I wanted was to maximise time with my family, spend time on my own, and just live.
There was always a chance I would love life without sport so much that I would decide not to go back. That fear is exactly what stopped me taking the break for so long. But the more I let myself simply be, the less pressure I put on the decision either way, and in the end the answer came naturally. I have never felt less stressed than I did just living. And something kept pulling me back.
This time the pull was different. Before, I was pulled by fear, by the pressure not to give up on myself, not to feel like a failure. After the break, the pull was curiosity. I wanted to explore something new in the sport. I wanted to fall back in love with it, because when you do something for this long you build a love-hate relationship with it. It is hard to put into words, but you end up feeling like you are failing at the very thing you are supposed to be.
I have been to two Olympic Games as a teenager, and you are constantly growing through that. I can see how much I changed from Tokyo, to Paris, to now. The goal is different every time, and the journey keeps getting better. After my final and my bronze in Paris, I came away with a new sense of what I actually wanted to achieve, and it had nothing to do with medals. It was about how much I could impact someone's life as they watch me dive, or listen to what I have to say.
I always knew that if I ever had a platform, I wanted to be vulnerable and authentic with it. I did not want anyone going through what I went through alone. I have been through too much to keep it to myself. So as I start this new journey towards LA, I want to be open about the reality of being an athlete, and about growing up as a human being at the same time.
The human and the athlete can coexist. It takes rejecting the toxic idea that you have to push until you break in order to achieve. We are seeing that shift across sport now, more athletes speaking openly about their mental health and about their lives beyond competition. Growing as an athlete is finally letting me grow as a human. Before, I was growing as an athlete while deteriorating as a person, because I was denying myself grace and humanity. I am slowly bringing the two back together, and that is what feels powerful about this new chapter.
I am still healing my relationship with platform. For a while I could not picture doing a dive off it without a wave of dread. I did not want to begin my comeback that way, so I thought, why not start on springboard and see what happens. Turns out I’m not too bad at it but I’m not ruling out a return to the 10m.
It feels like a return to my childhood love of diving. I feel like the version of me who first started, and that is why I am loving it so much, because it is reminding me why I fell for this in the first place. To have gone from hating it this time last year to growing back in love with it now is a really nice full circle moment.
I am proud of who I am becoming, and excited to see how far I can grow, what else I can do, and how else I can use my story to help other people. The road to LA starts here, and for the first time in a long time, I cannot wait.
Sportsbeat 2026