Simone Manuel Has Already Won

Simone Manuel stood in front of the mirror, staring at her reflection. She began to pump her arms through imagined water, practicing her freestyle stroke.

She needed a jolt of confidence on this Sunday late in June in Indianapolis, before the ninth and final session of the 2024 U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials. A spot on the Olympic team was on the line.

The 50-meter freestyle finals awaited—Manuel’s last chance to qualify for an individual event. But it was hardly a sure thing. She had finished fourth in the 100-meter freestyle—earning her a spot on the 4×100 freestyle relay team in Paris—and she was feeling deeply frustrated with her performance in the semifinal round of the 50. She had the fourth-fastest time heading into the final, and only the top two would make the Olympic team.

She tried to breathe—to find her peace.

“I’ve done it once,” Manuel said to herself in front of the mirror. “I can do it again.”

She visited her mother’s room, visibly shaken. “You just have to stay in it,” Sharron Manuel said to her daughter. “Swim your race … 99.9 percent of us would have given up by now.”

Simone knew her mother was right. It was nothing short of a miracle that she was even swimming at all, after everything she’d endured since winning four Olympic medals, including two golds, at the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro. Ahead of the delayed Tokyo games, when she was in the prime of her career, her body began to break down.

In early 2021, she was diagnosed with overtraining syndrome after her body essentially lost its ability to recuperate and adapt to her intense amount of swimming. It left her in a vicious cycle, constantly feeling exhausted and sick, her endocrine system disrupted as her body fought to overcome distress.

The condition left Manuel, one of the world’s fastest swimmers, unable to swim a mere 25 meters without being winded. She could only tolerate light walks. She was ordered to rest for weeks on end, and she resigned herself to living with the condition, hoping that maybe she could succeed in spite of it. But a disappointing finish at the pandemic-delayed Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2021 left Manuel devastated and questioning her future in the sport. She took five months off from swimming, searching for direction.

Yet even as her body continued to betray her, she couldn’t shake the feeling deep in her bones: She needed to get back in the water; she needed to get back on the Olympic team. “Even through the heartbreak,” Manuel said, “it wasn’t something in my soul that [I] was ready to give it up.”

But doing it would require starting over in a different state, with a new coach, and essentially reteaching her body how to swim like a champion. She returned to the pool each day, alone in the water with her doubts, her fears, her frustrations, her ego. But she possessed a stubbornness that wouldn’t let her accept that she could not live up to who she knew herself to be. It took more than courage; it took radical self-belief.

“It was very rare that someone [of her caliber] would have mentally withstood that process,” said her coach Bob Bowman, a legend in the sport who coached Michael Phelps. “In all the years of coaching people, that’s the hardest thing I’ve seen a swimmer go through—that kind of comeback.”

Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

Growing up in Sugar Land, Texas, Manuel seemed destined for swimming stardom, even as a young girl. She had a drive about her, the same drive that would propel her career forward as she broke many barriers as a Black woman in a predominantly white sport. In 2012, she swam in her first Olympic trials at age 15, four years before qualifying for her first Olympic team and making history in Rio. She turned pro in 2018 following an illustrious career at Stanford, where she helped the Cardinal win two national championships. When signing with the swimwear brand TYR Sport, Manuel built an inclusion rider into her contract—the first such agreement. She said she wanted to make sure that “her partners extend meaningful opportunities to traditionally underrepresented groups.” In the years since, she has continued to help increase access to swimming and nurture positive swim experiences for people of color, especially young people, through her charitable foundation.

She wanted to create a more inclusive space for young Black swimmers than what she had experienced as a child, when she faced obstacles as one of the only Black kids in the pool. Her father remembers that she won races at summer league meets right away, but they had to fight for her to be included in meets after she was passed over in favor of white children. And as she continued to dominate throughout her youth, joining Houston’s First Colony Swim Team at age 11, she faced other instances of “not being able to get in the pool,” her father, Marc Manuel, said. He sensed the underlying reason: “She had to deal with that from a racial perspective.” [Editor’s note: Since publication of this story, Simone and Sharron Manuel have clarified that Marc was referring to one instance of Simone being left off a relay as a young child. It was not a a regular occurrence throughout her youth.]

She didn’t let that deter her, but she often heard from other Black swimmers who were also excluded. Some of them quit the sport altogether, Marc recalled. Simone was even more motivated to keep pressing forward, not just for herself, but for those Black swimmers who felt there wasn’t space for them in the sport. “She feels like there’s a God-given purpose behind what she does,” Marc said, “and she’s willing to stick with it and fight through it.”

After winning the 100 in Rio, an emotional Manuel thanked Black swimmers who preceded her, such as Cullen Jones and Maritza Correia, saying: “It means a lot. This medal is not just for me, it’s for a lot of people who came before me.

“I hope I can be an inspiration to others,” she said. “So this medal is for those who come behind me and get into the sport and hopefully find the love and drive to get to this point.”

She had fought through some injuries as she rose to swimming stardom, but nothing was like what she would experience in the fall of 2020, when the early symptoms of overtraining syndrome, mainly fatigue, began to surface. At first, she wasn’t sure what was up. She hadn’t swum up to her standards at an October meet. She allowed herself some time to rest before the next meet in November. But in that competition, her times were better by only fractions of a second. “Something’s off,” she said to herself.

“That’s when the alarm bells were on,” she said.

Still, she tried not to panic and consistently trained into the early months of 2021. Still, her times lagged. By March, other physical symptoms surfaced, including loss of appetite, weight gain, sore and achy muscles, sleepiness, and sunken eyes.

By that point, she knew she couldn’t continue. “I was not my normal self,” she said. Something was deeply wrong.

When her doctor officially diagnosed her with overtraining syndrome on March 8, 2021, Manuel wasn’t sure how to grasp the news. Overtraining? All her life, she was taught that to be the best, she had to work harder than everyone. Working hard had been the answer to every problem. Lose a race? Work harder! Win a medal? Work harder to stay dominant! But the more she learned about the complex condition, the more she realized how severe it already was—and how much worse it could become.

Overtraining syndrome isn’t just feeling sore or tired after a strenuous workout; it’s a debilitating condition with physical and emotional symptoms that make an athlete feel depleted of energy as their body fails to recover from intense training. The body, trying its hardest to combat these symptoms, may go into fight-or-flight mode.

“Our bodies and our nervous systems are evolved to protect us and to keep us alive,” said Herbie Behm, another one of Manuel’s coaches, who is also the head coach of swimming and diving at Arizona State. “Not necessarily to perform. Certainly not to swim a fast 100 freestyle.”

After receiving the diagnosis, she returned to the pool and modified her training. She tried to lessen the intensity of her practices, but her body still wasn’t responding well. In a way, she felt worse.

A turning point came when Manuel was preparing to suit up for a race in practice in late March, but found herself questioning her ability to compete. Her confidence was shattered, and she knew there was no way she’d be able to swim well.

Manuel never wants to be out of the pool and would never skip a set in practice. But she felt so frustrated, so confused about why her recent performances had plummeted. She initially agreed to race that day but felt awful in warm-ups, physically in pain and emotionally depleted. Sadness consumed her. It was a foreign feeling; the pool had always been her sanctuary.

“I was really unhappy in the water,” she said.

Elite swimmers are usually so in tune with their bodies, with how the water feels on every bit of themselves, from their feet to their forearms to their fingertips. Manuel was drifting further and further from that sense of belonging.

“I need to get out,” she said. And she did.

It was a pivotal moment—for her to put the brakes on herself. And she did, withdrawing from the meet.

Two days later, she had a meeting with her doctor, her coach, and her mother. That was when it felt as if everything she had been working for had collapsed. It was crushing, hearing the doctor tell her that she needed to take a break before the trials for the Tokyo Olympics, which were just months away. But, she said, her doctor didn’t think she’d even make it to trials if she didn’t rest. She was told that even if she managed to make the Tokyo team, she’d have to take an extended break after the games.

“I might’ve ended my career if I didn’t take a break,” she said.

For months, she had been trying to fix whatever was wrong, but she soon realized that wasn’t getting her anywhere, especially now that she had a diagnosis and a doctor that would try to help her recover: “I was hurting myself more than I was helping myself.”

She started with a three-week break, when she’d wake up, eat breakfast, head to the couch, and sleep for four or five hours. Some days, she was so exhausted it was difficult for her to even keep her eyes open. Her body was unequivocally telling her that it needed this complete rest. She listened to it, but it was frustrating, and she didn’t know how she’d climb out or perform at the Olympic trials after taking this break.

She tried to stay hopeful, relying on her faith and her family, vowing to try to make the Tokyo team no matter how behind she felt. “I would rather try and fail than not even try at all,” Manuel said.

But when she returned to the pool, her body still felt sore. Tired. She continued to gain weight. It felt as if she was inhabiting a stranger’s body. “I don’t even look the same,” she’d say, eyeing herself in disbelief. “I’m not the same.”

“It was points where, I’m just going to be honest, Simone looked like she was just out of shape. Didn’t look like she was an athlete, per se,” said her brother Ryan. “You can tell that things [were] not right for her.”

The mental anguish tugged at her as much as the physical did. She dealt not just with her own doubts, but also with the way—according to her mother, Sharron—some other competitors seemed to look at her, wondering whether she would truly make a comeback. Manuel said she “was not in a good state” in both body and mind heading into the Tokyo trials in June 2021, and she finished ninth in the 100-meter freestyle, failing to make the final. Her time in the semifinal, 54.17 seconds, was nearly 1.5 seconds slower than her gold-medal-winning time in Rio. Still, she managed to secure a spot on the Olympic team by winning the 50-meter freestyle in 24.29 seconds. “Nothing short of a miracle,” she said. She vowed to show up fully at the Olympics, even if her body couldn’t give what it used to.

But once in Japan, she failed to advance to the 50-meter freestyle final, finishing 11th overall. She helped the 4×100 free relay team take home bronze.

She called her family after her final swim. “I’m just tired,” she told her mother.

“I know. I know you’re tired,” Sharron replied.

“No, Mom. I’m tired. I’m tired tired.”

In a way only mothers can, Sharron understood: “Your soul is tired.”

Manuel broke down, sobbing at the recognition of her pain. All that fixing and tinkering and thinking and resting and starting and stopping and fearing and rebounding had left her completely depleted. She had given her best, and it simply wasn’t enough. Not anymore.

For so long, all she had known was what it felt like to win. And now she truly understood loss, felt how debilitating and all-encompassing it was. She wasn’t sure whether she would swim again.

Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images

After returning home from Tokyo, she realized she had been in survival mode for so long that she had failed to be fully in touch with her emotions. She needed to heal more than just her body. She spoke with a sports psychologist. She spent time journaling to get her feelings out of her head and onto the page. She called it “word dumping.” She started to feel a little better each week. Rejuvenated, even. “Healing myself mentally allowed my body to heal itself physically as well,” she said.

Her career stood at a crossroads. She knew she could call it quits; she had achieved at the highest levels of the sport. She had inspired a generation of swimmers, especially Black women swimmers. She didn’t have anything left to prove. But she wasn’t ready to leave—not in this way. Not with her performance in Tokyo as the final chapter. She felt she owed it to herself to see what she had left. She began eyeing the Paris Games, when she would be 27 years old. She knew it would be hard. Really, really hard. But she needed to prove herself right.

“We thought that she had done enough,” Marc said, “but Simone is just really not wired that way. She wants to at least try, right?”

But Manuel hadn’t swum since she returned home from Tokyo in August 2021, and she was severely out of shape. “I just had to start somewhere,” she said. That somewhere was a 24 Hour Fitness. She bought a membership, and just a few days into January 2022, she swam her first laps in five months. There was no coach, no clock, no elite teammates. Just Manuel and ordinary people at the local gym, hoping to get in some exercise.

Alone with her insecurities, her frustrations, she pumped her arms through the water each day, getting used to what it felt like to simply swim. All her life, the waves had been a comfort. This was almost like getting to know that version of herself again. Learning the flow of the water again. “Becoming attached to it again,” she said.

She had to learn to trust her body—and trust herself. But she needed help. In June 2022, she sought out coach Bob Bowman. That August, she moved from California to Arizona to train with him. Their first meeting was sobering. Bowman didn’t sugarcoat things. “I think this is going to be a very long, difficult, and frustrating process,” he said he told her. “And if you’re not up for that, you should either go somewhere else or quit.

“It will take every day of the two years we have to get you where you want to be.”

Manuel blinked, surprised.

“She was just so far away,” Bowman said. “You could see she wasn’t the Simone that we had seen in 2016 [in Rio].” Like Bowman, Manuel was a no-BS kind of competitor. She knew the reality of her situation and wasn’t going to back down.

“I knew I would be starting at ground zero,” Manuel said.

“When you go back down to the bottom,” she said, “that really is … ‘How bad do you want it?’ I wanted it badly.”

Bowman, now the head coach and director of swimming and diving at the University of Texas, came up with a plan for her: start as small as they possibly could with the yardage and intensity of her training. She started with 15 or 20 straight minutes of swimming, gradually building up to 30. They continued to slowly, incrementally increase that time at a low enough intensity to build up her stamina again, with the goal of sustaining a one-hour practice. No matter how much she yearned to speed up her training, Bowman wouldn’t allow it until he was certain that her body was responding well. They couldn’t risk overtraining again and Manuel falling further behind.

Starting back at square one was humbling. Some days, she was so frustrated that she wasn’t anywhere near as fast as she used to be. She wasn’t able to streamline off the wall like she used to. She wasn’t able to explode off the block like she used to. She had been the first woman to break 46 seconds in the 100-yard freestyle, and now she was struggling to do repetitions of 100s at 80-second intervals. She didn’t recognize this version of herself. This version of her body.

“There were so many athletic movements that just were not present from the woman that won a gold medal in 2016,” said Erik Posegay, another one of her coaches. “You’re just like, ‘I know it’s Simone Manuel, but it doesn’t look like Simone Manuel.’”

She’d constantly compare herself with that other version of her, the first Black woman swimmer to win an individual gold medal at the Olympics, the swimmer who’d won 16 medals at the world championships, including 11 golds. She yearned to return to that self. That Simone, as she would come to call her.

Her coaches told her she had to let That Simone go: “If you’re going to move forward, you got to accept where you are first,” Posegay said. “This isn’t Olympic champion Simone that’s returning to the sport. All those accomplishments are still there, but the person’s changed emotionally, physically. … And can that person get back to that? Sure. Can that person be even better? Sure, absolutely.”

Posegay, Bowman, and Behn had a motto for her: “Progress over perfection.” The goal was to get a little bit better each day. Tiny changes. Quiet breakthroughs. Bowman would tell her that each day was like putting a small deposit in the bank. Some days it’s a penny. Some days it’s a dollar. Some days it’s $10. But she would need to keep stacking the deposits in hopes of one day withdrawing them at the trials and, hopefully, in Paris.

But they all knew she was a ways away from competing at an elite level. These were not gold medal days but grind-it-out and see-who-you-really-are days. Each time she berated herself for a poor swim, Bowman would ask her: “What were you doing last year around this time?”

Her answer was that she was at home on the couch, watching TV.

“Yeah. So we’re 100 percent better than that,” Bowman would say.

He shared stories with her about Phelps’s difficult comeback about a decade earlier, after he took a year off because of a number of personal issues outside the pool; he recalled the day when Phelps nearly quit for good. Phelps had been practicing the backstroke—which he’d once held two world records in—with a high school girl, and she was beating him. Bowman recalled that Phelps told him he thought his comeback attempt would fail.

But Phelps persevered, and so could Manuel. “Even the best have to work,” Bowman told her. “Even Michael.”

Manuel started to improve week by week, encouraged by the way her coaches told her to keep patient. Not to compare herself with That Simone. She returned to racing in January 2023, and again, she was humbled, unable to clock competitive times. “The meets were terrible,” Bowman said. “It was so bad.”

She struggled through the bulk of the TYR Pro competitions in early 2023, going to Knoxville, Tennessee, in January; Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in February; Westmont, Illinois, in April; and Mission Viejo, California, in May. Knoxville—the January meet—was particularly challenging.

At that first meet of the season, she swam the 100-meter freestyle in 54.81 seconds. Although that time was good enough to qualify her for the 2024 Olympic trials, it was well behind her Tokyo trials time, when she failed to make the final, and nearly a second slower than where she and Bowman had hoped she’d be at that point in her comeback attempt. And she was a full second slower in the 50-meter freestyle than she had been in June 2021.

But she kept racing. And kept falling short. Despite months of training and competing, her times barely improved. She failed to break 54 seconds in the 100-meter freestyle that summer—while the world leaders were swimming it in 53 seconds or faster. And she never went under 25 seconds in the 50 freestyle—making less than a one-tenth improvement since that first meet in January. The women she needed to beat if she wanted to make another Olympic team and compete for a medal were swimming 1.5 seconds faster.

It was a painful inflection point, and Bowman questioned whether Manuel would want to keep going. But she had the courage to be vulnerable when many athletes with her résumé would be too embarrassed to attempt this type of comeback and risk failing in front of an audience. Some swimmers won’t even do a double—swimming two events in a session—because they want to protect themselves. They can’t risk failing publicly.

“Ninety percent of people would have quit,” Bowman said. But Manuel kept showing up, no matter how far she felt from her Olympic dream.

She started working with a different nutritionist and remained focused on her training in the pool. Her coaches made her think of one positive thing she did each day. “I guess my kicking was better,” Manuel would say, breaking into a smile. A smile that was starting to emerge more and more. She became increasingly confident, and she also tuned into her body again, relearning instincts that told her when to push herself and when to rest. And finally, in November, the breakthrough came. She swam season bests in both the 50- and 100-meter freestyles at the U.S. Open in Greensboro, North Carolina, and turned in an encouraging performance in the 200—a distance she wasn’t strong enough to race months earlier.

She was filled with the excitement of possibility. She was in love with the water again and slipped into its rhythm, its familiar contours. It felt right. She savored the feeling of her hand touching the wall—the pure joy of it all. Joy that had at one point seemed irrevocably lost. She started to feel more like herself again, even if that self—This Simone—was still evolving.

“Those two Simones are one and the same,” she said. “I still had to continue to put one foot in front of the other and continue to fight for what I believe in.”

Instead of chasing an old ghost of herself or dwelling on how she could get back there, she focused on how she could be fully here. “How can I get better today?” she’d ask herself. In this moment, in this body, with this heart.

Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images

That mentality helped prepare her for the tribulations she’d face at the U.S. Olympic trials in June, where she competed in the 50-, 100-, and 200-meter freestyles.

The stakes were beyond high. Nerves abounded. Pressure could be felt in every corner of the stadium. The U.S. Olympic swimming team is arguably the hardest American team to make—making the trials one of the most competitive meets in the world and, in some ways, the saddest, with some of the fastest swimmers failing to make the squad. And for women freestylers, the field is even more stacked; with competitors like Gretchen Walsh, Kate Douglass, and Abbey Weitzeil in the sprints and Katie Ledecky in the 200, the competition is fierce. Manuel was tested immediately, finishing seventh in the 200 freestyle—.08 seconds out of sixth place, which would have earned her a spot in the 4×200 relay—and then turning in a fourth-place finish in the 100. She finished in 53.25, shaving more than 1.5 seconds off her time from her first comeback meet, and earned a spot on the Paris team in the 4×100 freestyle relay. But that individual spot eluded her.

And so, with her final chance to qualify for Paris in the 50, she stepped away from her hotel mirror and began watching old highlights of herself, specifically from the 2019 World Championships, where she won four gold medals.

That Simone.

That night of the 2024 Olympic Trials, she gave the race everything she had. Afterward, she pulled off her goggles and glanced up to see her time: 24.13 seconds. First place, .02 seconds ahead of Walsh. Last summer, she couldn’t break 25 seconds, and now she had swum faster than she did at the Tokyo trials three years earlier. A wave of shock washed over Manuel as she shook her head back and forth, pumping her fist. She broke into a giant smile. It was sinking in: She had done it. In that moment, she felt pure relief, she said.

“I’ve had to exude a lot of resilience and determination and perseverance just to continue to improve and be able to compete at this level again,” she said.

Now, as she prepares for Paris, she repeats a mantra her mother often says to her: “Don’t call it a comeback. It’s just unfinished business.”

“She had a part of her story that didn’t get written or told the way she wanted,” Sharron said. “People wanted to write that story for her and put a tombstone on her career.”

Success, Manuel now knows, is about more than medals or world records. It’s about giving everything you have with whatever you have. Having the humility to start over. Putting one foot in front of the other when even getting out of bed seems insurmountable.

“Simone put herself out there and [made] herself vulnerable and let everybody know, ‘Hey, I’m human, too. This can happen to anybody,’” her brother Ryan said. “The fact that [she] can get up and bounce back, it also shows the true testament to [her] character, that just because you’re down and out one day doesn’t mean that everything’s going to be the same tomorrow.”

Of course, she still burns to win another gold in Paris. That competitive drive in her, the one that wouldn’t let her quit, isn’t just satisfied with making the team. “I’m really unfinished,” Manuel said. “There’s still business to do.” So she returns to the water, preparing for a new day. A new set. A chance to inch closer to the Simone she will become.