Paris 2024: Meet the Olympic gold medalist who can't see when she's won

PARIS — Kaylee McKeown lunged for the wall. Her head popped out of water. She peered off into the distance, searching a scoreboard some 300 feet away. And for a second or two here at the 2024 Olympics, she did not emote.

She had just won gold in the 100-meter backstroke. But she was one of the last inside Paris La Défense Arena to know.

And she had a unique reason.

“I mean, without my glasses,” McKeown explained, “I can't see too much.”

She later described that "scary moment," when she touches the wall, and looks up, and … "Is that first? Second? Third? Fourth? Fifth? Sixth?"

“You never actually know,” she said.

The irony is that it is almost always first. McKeown has not lost a backstroke final of any distance, anywhere, in nearly two years. She has only lost once at 100 or 200 meters since 2019. She is now a back-to-back Olympic champion.

But she also happens to be very near-sighted. She wears glasses in everyday life (and on medal podiums). The one place she can’t wear them, of course, is in a pool.

She apparently tried prescription goggles; "Turns out I still can't see," she wrote at the time. So, when her hand hits the wall, and her horizontal body goes vertical, the scoreboard typically positioned at the far end of the pool is often fuzzy.

In Paris, though, she has found a solution. Mollie O’Callaghan, a gold medal-winning freestyler and her roommate at the Olympic Village, pointed out a recent Omega innovation that’s present at this temporary pool. Positioned next to each starting block is a board with three panels. One lights up in the winner’s lane; two light up for the second place finisher; and three for third.

“So I quickly checked that,” McKeown said Tuesday. “Just to double check my facts.”

Then she hugged Regan Smith, her American rival — or, more accurately, her American friend. They shared an embrace full of respect. “She’s 1 of 1,” Smith later raved. McKeown thanked Smith, because "I wouldn’t be the athlete I am if it wasn’t for her,” she said.

Then she celebrated, with some pumps of her fist, and eventually a triumphant scream.

She was later asked whether, in an odd way, her near-sightedness has helped her stay in her own proverbial lane, unaffected by externalities. “Look, I'd like to say yes,” she said. Daniel Wiffen, another bespectacled gold medalist Tuesday, said that “sometimes it’s best actually not to see. Sometimes it’s best to go a bit blind.”

But he can see fine these days. And McKeown? “At the end of the day, I can still see splashes and things that are happening around me,” she said.

It’s after the race, when looking for confirmation of her greatness, that she has this quirky struggle.

But it was “nice,” she said, to find confirmation behind her — and to “just soak it in for a hot second.”