Chloë McCardel: “Swimming is a part of who I am. I don't think I'll ever walk away"
Words: Daniel Shailer
‘Grit. Determination. Success.’
These are the words record-breaking Australian swimmer Chloë McCardel uses when describing her story of endurance.
Ross Edgeley (the man who swam around Great Britain) couldn’t decide which world record to break: ‘the world’s longest current-neutral swim in an ocean’ around the balmy seas of Bermuda, or ‘the longest staged sea swim’ in the icy waters and whirlpools of the British Isles. He was faced with a choice between an arguably more impressive feat of athleticism and an undeniably great story – the deciding factor? A Royal Marine Captain told him to go for the story and the glory of a swim around Britain, because a current-neutral swim in Bermuda ‘just sounds a bit shit.’
With her latest record, Australian swimmer Chloë McCardel has done both.
The unapproachable athletic feat: in 2014 she swam the Exuma Sound between two islands in the Bahamas. South Eleuthera to Nassau; 124.4 kilometres; over 41 hours; the longest uninterrupted, unassisted ocean swim ever and an unassailable feat of endurance speed (she laid down the fastest average speed of any unassisted swim over 100k).
The undeniably great story: this year she swam across the English Channel for the 44th time, breaking the all-time record for the sheer volume of crossings. It makes her the ‘Queen of the Channel’ after she left the ‘King’ (Kevin Murphy) behind with her 35th swim last year.
In twelve years of Channel swimming, she overtook four decades of work for Murphy and over three for the long-reigning queen, Alison Streeter MBE.
The first question people ask when they hear about these swims is ‘why?’, so I ask Chloë. ‘When I was nineteen’, she says, ‘I decided I wanted to be the best at something, figured it was going to be sport, tried triathlon for a couple of years, wasn’t progressing well, ran a marathon in a good time, swam a marathon in a very good time and loved the marathon swimming.’
Chloë breezes past the fact that most 19-year-olds are scrambling between student bars and uni deadlines (possibly because she’s spoken about this part of her story at length elsewhere), not deciding which sporting world to conquer.
Before there’s time to mention that, Chloë has moved on. ‘A single [English Channel] crossing was never going to satisfy my aspirations’, she says. ‘I figured if I wanted to be one of the best marathon swimmers today, or potentially one of the best in history, I would need to do something over and above.’
Naturally, Chloë began her Channel journey with a “double” crossing: a swim to France then back to Dover, with a regulation ten-minute break where, according to the Channel Swimming Association, ‘he [or she] may stand or sit’ in the water.
She set her sights on a “triple”, but it took another five years of swimming before, in 2015, Chloë became just the fourth person to swim England-France-England. Unsatisfied, she then took on the Bahamas swim, to ‘cement’ (in her words) her position at the top of the sport.
Unsatisfied, in 2017 she returned to the Channel to attempt a four-way crossing. She failed (since then Sarah Thomas has become the only ever successful swimmer) but by this point had racked up enough successful crossings to set her sights on a different challenge. ‘I’m at 13 crossings’ she thought. ‘If I do seven more I get the Australian record’. And from there only 20-odd more and the international, all-time record was hers.
Attentive readers will, by this point, have spotted a pattern. Unsatisfied with a triple crossing and the longest sea swim ever, she set out to swim the channel 24 more times. Listening to Chloë it almost sounds like the obvious thing to do.
Despite how breezy McCardel makes it sound in hindsight, becoming Queen of the Channel takes inhuman reserves of determination. For most of her swimming career, she’s endured brutal pool training with Olympic, medal-winning National Swimmers from team Australia, albeit with ‘20% specialisation’ towards endurance work.
After 44 crossings, there are still the same uncontrollables every swimmer encounters. Number 40 ‘knocked me for absolute six’, she remembers, and the call for number 44 came as she was beginning on a second course of antibiotics for chest infection.
Years earlier, attempting a triple crossing, she contracted swimming induced pulmonary oedema and ‘nearly died’ in hospital (where she was rushed only after completing the third leg). The final bevy of crossings was nearly scuppered by travel restrictions in 2020, an issue that ended in a ‘barrage’ of misogynistic social media criticism.
More than anything, dedicating her life to open water swimming has demanded an enormous level of sacrifice: ‘time, effort’ yes, but also ‘a family … normal career.’ It is, after all, precisely the fact that no one else would willingly sacrifice those things which drew Chloë to the precipice.
The achievement could only be matched by someone willing to make the same sacrifices over more than a decade. Because she understood that, she knew the record, the title, the unassailable achievement ‘would be something that I could keep’, probably forever. I believe her.
Things have been busy since the record. After a media tour of reporters, ambassadors and politicians – including 30 interviews in the 24 hours immediately following her last swim – Chloë has returned to coaching future Channel swimmers.
Since I spoke to her she has also revealed plans for a new swim challenge: an epic ten-person relay from England to Belgium over almost a hundred kilometres and 40 hours. This time she’ll be on the boat as head coach, not in the water.
Because despite various caveats, there is a sense that Chloë may finally be satisfied. She has laid down the gauntlet to ‘anyone that’s listening: If you come near my record I’m coming back, so you can try!’
There is even one ‘active male swimmer’ she has her eye on, but ‘they only do one or two [swims] a year’. So – for now at least – a teenage dream almost two decades in the making has finally been put to bed. ‘I’m just happy.’
Chloë has the natural energy of someone who talks in lists; so, before I notice, we’ve been talking for over an hour and I’m apologising that I still have a few questions left. In the end, it is clear at least to me that Chloë has a chip on her shoulder.
After swimming the Channel 44 times, she has a justification not to attempt a record for speed and a reason not to challenge Sarah Thomas’ record for a four-way. She’s keeping tabs on a swimmer who’s “only” swum the Channel 20 times and can reel off a list of which papers featured pictures of the last swim on their front pages and which had spreads inside.
It’s also clear, after speaking to Chloë, where the chip comes from. She’s dedicated her career to the sport of swimming but at times it seems to her that swimming – or at least the culture surrounding female athletes – has not given as much back.
Despite being the best ultra-marathon swimmer in the world, let alone her country, Swim Australia refuse to recognise her achievements: ostensibly because each record was ‘not a race’. ‘That has made my life a nightmare for so many years’, Chloë says, because she’s ‘not eligible for any awards, official recognition’ or (most importantly) ‘any funding’.
It’s not just an issue with one governing body. ‘If you’re born a male compared to being born a female, your opportunities to be a professional athlete are exponentially higher,’ she has learned. ‘Women’s sport gets a really rough time […] it’s going to take 50-100 years for female athletes that are at the top of their sports [tennis and surfing are exceptions, Chloë admits] to get paid on parity with the male athletes.’ To understate the issue: ‘That has really annoyed me.’
Some would put it to Chloë that Open Water swimming, in general, is underfunded – or at least it has been since the heyday of Channel swimming prize-pots in the 1970s. It is, after all, an amateur sport and not one which lends itself to ticket-touting spectators.
‘What you’re saying is, in one way, correct, but if I was born a man I could have been a professional cricketer; I could have been a professional football player in multiple leagues […]. I could have been an athlete and chosen a sport where I was paid really well, but because I had close to zero chance of actually getting paid (no matter what sport I did), why then I happen to end up in marathon swimming.’ From anyone else, it might seem arrogant. From Chloë – who decided to become a world-great at the age I thought it would be smart to grow out a mullet – it just seems obvious. It’s also not just an issue of pay.
Throughout her career, Chloë has caught journalists ‘skewing away from typically masculine traits which I espouse to the broader narrative of “Chloë’s Life”’.
It’s true: the eve of her record attempt, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a letter from Chloë under the title ‘At 11, I couldn’t swim’. The Mirror put ‘Woman's epic swims in shark-infested waters’ before her world record and The Guardian (just three weeks ago) ran an interview with Chloë about ‘the beauty and pain’ of Channel swimming.
The upshot is that Chloë, like every open water swimmer, chose the sport for the love of swimming more than anything else. More than 400 hours in the Channel have left Chloë a special relationship with the body of water. Many who leave the shore in Dover remember it only as a dark, miserable battleground (It’s Cold in the Channel, wrote Sam Rockett) but Chloë feels only ‘a strong sense that this is my home, that I have a connection.’ (A feeling Sarah Thomas shared after her four-way crossing: 'it's a special body of water [...] I don't know what it is, but it's a magical and special place.')
For Chloë, this experience of ‘spiritual home’ has inadvertently served a dual purpose since her experience of domestic abuse left her with PTSD. It’s something she speaks openly about how to ‘process the trauma’ and her advocacy has become a leading light for victims in Australia and internationally.
At the time – by virtue of both of her perpetrators and their attempts to evict and put Chloë under intervention order – she felt ‘hopeless, depressed, anxious’. Since then she’s spoken of swimming and in particular the Channel as a place for ‘rehabilitation’. Magically, speaking out has become a vehicle to reappropriate the swamps of social media for good.
Chloë describes a kind of productive feedback loop: ‘I’m getting so much positive feedback from those who have experienced DV themselves or who have been victim-blamed […] because of that positive feedback I’m feeling safe and I’m feeling confident to tell my story.’
So, finally, what is Chloë’s story? It’s true she couldn’t swim at 11. She has swum with sharks (‘I love sharks’, of course) and she's survived domestic abuse. At 19 years old she did decide to be the best in the world. Fifteen years later, she is. But if she was writing the headlines it would all be much more simple: ‘Grit. Determination. Success’.