“Everything I wanted to achieve”
Two -time Olympic champion ends career
06.09.2025 – 9:53 a.m.Reading time: 1 min.
It has shaped swimming sports for years. Now Sharon van Rouwendaal ends her impressive sporting career.
Sharon van Rouwendaal has drawn a line under her extraordinary swimming career. The two -time Olympic champion from the Netherlands declared her resignation on Friday evening on Dutch television. In the program “RTL Tonight”, the 31-year-old spoke openly about the burdens of competitive sports and her personal motives.
Since 2020, Van Rouwendaal in Magdeburg under the direction of the German national coach Bernd Berkhahn, who also looks after Olympic champion Florian Wellbrock. In the Elbe city, she further shaped her impressive open -air water career.
Van Rouwendaal said that as a young girl at the age of 13 she had left her parents’ house, trained seven hours a day and sacrificed a lot: “You have a lot of injuries and actually have to do everything for it,” she said. Everyday life was characterized by training, sleep and pain. She emphasized: “I have achieved everything I wanted to achieve and I missed my parents and my family very much. Now I live on the same street as you.”
Her balance is impressive: gold at the 2016 Olympics in Rio and 2024 in Paris over the 10,000 meters of open water, plus silver in Tokyo 2021. Three times, she became world champion, eight times European champion. She also demonstrated her skills in the swimming pool-with six Dutch records and a world record with the 4×200-meter freestyle relay.