Three-time Olympic champion Stephanie Rice has revealed the truth behind her emotional social media post at the end of the Tokyo Games.

From the age of 17 when Rice burst onto the scene with two gold medals at the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games right up to her official retirement in 2014, the Queensland superstar was one of the faces of Australian swimming.

Catch all the ICC T20 World Cup action live & exclusive to Fox Cricket, available on Kayo. New to Kayo? Start your free trial today.

Rice represented Australia at the 2008 Beijing Games, where she won the 200m and 400m individual medleys and 4x200m freestyle relay all in world record times, and the 2012 London Games, where injuries cruelled her chances as she finished fourth in the 200m IM and sixth in the 400m IM.

While she’s been relatively out of the spotlight since retiring from the sport, Rice returned to the public eye in 2021 when she featured in the Channel 7’s coverage of the Tokyo Games on Sunrise, providing analysis of the action in the pool.

But the now 33-year-old also left many people shocked after she posted a raw and emotional message to Instagram in the aftermath of the Games and how difficult it was to watch the event again.

Rice posted a short video of herself with tears in her eyes, posting about how difficult it was to watch the Olympics having been there herself.

The message, where she revealed she “felt lost, depressed, irrelevant and as though I had achieved the pinnacle of my life at 24 and everything moving forward would be far less exciting and special” resonated with plenty of people, including former athletes who were quick to share their own stories.

But speaking on sports broadcaster Mark Howard’s podcast The Howie Games, Rice opened up about the post, revealing more about how difficult the transition was from athlete to the next stage of her life.

“People would ask me if I was still swimming and I would say no,” she told Howard of the immediate aftermath of walking away from swimming.

“The next question was, ‘What do you do now?’ and I couldn’t answer it. I just felt like I was lying the whole the time, saying wishy-washy things like ‘I still do a bit of speaking, I do some brand ambassador work and a little bit of coaching. Those things would literally take up five days of my year.

“I fluffed it up to sound okay but what I really wanted to say was, ‘I have no idea, I have no direction, I’m lost and it’s really frustrating’. It just felt like there was a reputation to uphold and my identity is that I’m a successful driven person, so to not feel like I identify with that publicly just felt wrong.”

Rice said she did as many self-help seminars, listened to podcasts, read success books, studied online courses and everything she could to find a direction.

It was a key role to discover who she was as a person without swimming.

“All I have ever known is Stephanie Rice the swimmer and now I’m not that any more so literally who am I?” she said. “I know that now and I’ve done that work, re-identified that person and so therefore I don’t really relate to who I was as a swimmer any more. I’m completely different and I really felt like I had to detach from that person in order to move on.

“So watching the Olympics or really any high performance swimming meet, I go back to reliving this past life. I knew it was going to be hard so it’s not like I was unprepared for it and I also have all the tools to work through it and get myself out of those states and so I consciously knew I was okay.

“I’m okay, I’m a happy content person, and I genuinely am this person.

“However, watching the Olympics is like watching the highlights version of an athletic career because it’s one moment in four years. It isn’t real life because it’s not what your life really looks like as an athlete. It’s really easy for all athletes to watch it and I have FOMO (fear of missing out), I want to be back there, I miss that but that isn’t the reality of what your athletic career actually looks like. It’s really easy to watch the highlight version of the Olympics and feel that sadness and also — and this is why the transition is so hard — I would never feel that way again, I would never experience that type of life again or that kind of high again.”

Rice said that as a high performing athlete, she was able to reach the highest of highs in performing at her best, but also lows that “leave you down and lost and depressed and frustrated”.

She also added that at the end of her career, having retired at 24, it was just about transitioning to her next profession.

The problem came when her skills from swimming didn’t necessarily transition out of the pool.

She said: “I have applied for jobs and when I put on the resume three-time Olympic gold medallist, I’ve never got past the first application stage because I’m sure people look at it and go, ‘That’s cute but what skills do you have and what experience do you have in this space or this sector’.

“That is really hard because you’ve literally worked so hard to be the best at something and find those skills to be amazing and the best in the world and now they mean nothing.”

It was these feelings that led to the emotional Instagram post in September.

Rice said that she didn’t want to post it during the Games so current athletes could have their time in the sun.

She added that she also doesn’t feel the way she felt in the immediate aftermath of the Olympics. However, it doesn’t make it any easier for former athletes.

“I knew from speaking to other athletes during the Olympics that a lot of us felt the same way, but couldn’t really articulate it or didn’t feel comfortable that they were struggling, because it feels jealous,” Rice said.

“You feel like it’s wrong to feel sad when somebody else is having the highlight of their life.

“It feels like you’re a bad person or something. I just wanted to be able to put into words the way I had personally felt.”

Rice said she was “overwhelmed” by the response to the post as she felt like it started a conversation, even though it was not her original intention.

“It frustrated me some of the stuff that came out publicly after that too because it was like ‘Steph’s depression’ and I was like, ‘No, no, no, you’ve missed the point, you’ve pulled a key word to make an article and that wasn’t the point’,” she said. “The point is ‘I’m okay’.

“So I personally don’t feel like it was brave or anything special to do that because I have come through the light at the end of the tunnel in that journey of transition and mental health and all the struggles that I went through and I’m genuinely in a really good place. People would meet me and say, ‘She’s a happy, bubbly, content person’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah I am’.

“What I was really touched by was in particular the amount of athletes that have recently retired that are probably in the thick of the darkness where they can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel to feel like ‘okay, Steph achieved the top of what she achieved and she went through the same thing I’m feeling so a) I’m not alone and b) there’s light at the end of the tunnel and I can get through it.”

Hear the entire chat between Mark Howard and three-time Olympic gold medallist Stephanie Rice on episode 138 of The Howie Games podcast.