This article appeared in twistkoala.com and has been published here with permission.
Olympic medalists are among the most exceptional human beings on the planet. Unsurprisingly, these outstanding individuals often continue to excel later in life… Check out some of the greatest Olympians and how they’re doing nowadays.
Tara Lipinski
Tara Lipinski made history at just 14 years, nine months, and 10 days old when she became the 1997 World Figure Skating Champion. The following year, the American skating sensation converted this success to Olympic gold in the 1998 Olympics, but when she became professional that same year, it meant she could no longer compete in competitions. The media lambasted her, and one journalist likened it to joining the circus. Lipinski ended her professional career in 2002, but later said she was searching for something, so she launched a sports commentator career.
Simone Biles
Biles is considered one of the greatest gymnasts in the world, with four gold medals and a slew of other gymnastics medals that make her the most decorated American gymnast. Since bringing home those golds in Rio 2016, she took a break but couldn’t stay away from the sport forever. With the Tokyo Olympics postponed until 2021, there’s still uncertainty over what exactly will happen, but Biles will likely be the biggest face of those competing.
Brooke Bennett
American swimmer Brooke Bennett had lost her grandfather mere days before winning big at Atlanta 1996. Despite the tragedy, winning gold anyway was a huge success story, although this personal story might have been overshadowed by swimming star Janet Beth Evans’ last appearance at the Games. Bennett won two more gold medals at the 2000 Olympics but was unable to qualify for the 2004 Olympics. She retired from competitive swimming, yet she coaches high school, opened and runs the Brooke Bennett Swim School, and swims marathons.
Carly Patterson
Carly Patterson was inducted into the USA Gymnastics Hall of Fame thanks to her performances in the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, which was the first time an American won the all-around competition in a non-boycotted Olympics. After this, she was forced to retire because of an injury she realized she had in her back. “Carly,” she was told by her doctor, “you really need to stop if you want to be able to walk when you get older.” Patterson since then launched her music career as a singer/songwriter.
Nastia Liukin
Nastia Liukin is the daughter of two Russian gymnastic champions who had moved to the U.S., so she was fated to become a star gymnast from the start. Raised in America, she represented the U.S. in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, where she won five medals. Liukin didn’t make the team for the 2012 Olympics, though this didn’t stop her from branching out. She’s made many appearances at special events and on TV, including Dancing with the Stars and Ninja Warrior.
Michael Phelps
Michael Phelps smashed fellow American Mark Spitz’s records, winning an incredible 23 Olympic gold medals. This brings his total Olympic medals up to 28. After 2012, sit was thought that he had retired, yet in 2016 he returned to the Olympic Games, this time in Rio, and dominated the competition. They were his fourth Games. Besides winning medals, he also started the Michael Phelps Foundation in 2008, which grows swimming as a sport to promote health ever since he committed a $1 million bonus from Speedo.
Nancy Kerrigan
Nancy Kerrigan may be best remembered when rival Tonya Harding’s husband ordered a hit to cripple her, after which she came back to win a silver medal at the 1994 Winter Olympics. If she hadn’t been attacked, there’s a chance she could have won the gold. Later, she continued skating in several different ice shows. Besides skating, her mother is blind, so she started a foundation to support and raise awareness for the vision-impaired. Kerrigan has appeared in movies and TV, both in guest appearances and as a reporter or host for various programs.
Dominique Moceanu
Dominique Moceanu became the youngest to compete for a medal in the Olympics when she arrived in Atlanta shortly after her 14th birthday, winning gold in the all-around competition. Unfortunately, injuries forced her to retire only four years later. Moceanu wrote a book about how training so hard from such a young age affected her.
Matt Biondi
Matt Biondi was overshadowed in his generation by Mark Spitz, but only ever so slightly. Biondi has 11 Olympic medals and eight of those are gold, one less than Spitz. Although competitive swimming is what Biondi’s name will be most connected to, he also played water polo. He swam at the Olympic games from 1984 to 1992, yet he is another athlete who decided to stay in his craft. Coaching kids for the local swimming team keeps him connected, but Biondi’s main profession is a math teacher.
Dominique Dawes
Another one of the “Magnificent Seven,” Dominique Dawes was the one who took home the all-around medal, but that’s not her only distinction. In fact, she’s the first American gymnast to win medals in three consecutive Summer Olympics after she came out of retirement to compete in the 2000 Sydney Games. Before her, no one of African descent had won a gold medal at the Olympics for gymnastics. Dawes has only become more of a national asset since then, having been appointed as a sports advisor to the U.S. government.
Greg Louganis
Gregory Louganis was the first diver in history to receive a perfect score from Olympic judges for one of his dives, so it’s no surprise he has won four gold medals. The first two were in 1984 and the rest in 1988, as he swept the men’s events. An LGBT activist whose endorsements were initially dropped when he came out of the closet, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, he’s since then found acceptance and become a mentor for the U.S. diving team.
Dorothy Hamill
Dorothy Hamill first started skating when she was eight, which isn’t the youngest the world has seen, but by the age of 12 she was beating other girls at competitions. In the 1976 Winter Olympics, she wowed the world with her routine and won a gold medal. Hamill has her very own skating move called the Hamill Camel, which is when the skater changes a camel spin to a sit spin. She remained one of the most popular athletes decades after her performance and made quite a lot of TV appearances over the years.
Inge de Bruijn
Inge de Bruijn, the Dutch swimmer, tried several different sports before she focused on swimming. It was a long time before she became a champion, but hard work pays off and she won four gold medals. Before she retired in 2007, she became the oldest Olympian to win gold, and she’s still the oldest woman to do so. Her brother is Matthijs de Bruijn, a fellow Olympian who played water polo in the 2000 Games. De Bruijn was once the face of Sapph, a Dutch lingerie company, and now lives in Eindhoven.
Shannon Miller
The media have always called U.S. gymnasts by creative names, and Shannon Miller was one of the so-called “Magnificent Seven” who competed in Atlanta in 1996. She was returning after bringing home five medals in the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games and took home two more golds in ’96. Miller is deservedly considered one of the greatest gymnasts who competed at the Olympics. After her achievements, Miller has spent her time starting a foundation whose stated intent is to combat childhood obesity.
Larisa Latynina
Larisa Latynina from the Soviet Union was a record-holder until Michael Phelps came along, having won no less than 18 Olympic medals — five of them gold! After achieving victory at the Olympics between 1956 and 1964, she coached for the Soviet team. The Soviet women’s team won gold in 1968, 1972, and 1976 before she retired from coaching. Then, Latynina was an organizer for the 1980 Moscow Games’ gymnastics competition. Today, she lives in a rural estate in Russia.
Paul Hamm
After Paul Hamm won gold at the all-around in the 2004 Athens Olympics, he became the only American gymnast to have won the all-around in both the Olympics and the Gymnastics World Championships. This gold medal was controversial because of a scoring error that happened to one of his competitors, but the medal remained with Hamm, who also won a pair of silvers. After he failed to make the team both in 2008 and 2012, he made appearances on the Japanese version of Ninja Warrior.
Annie Hatch
Annia Hatch was born in Cuba, and she represented her homeland since she was four years old. Despite qualifying for the 1996 Olympics, the Cuban Olympic Committee didn’t have enough funds to send her to the games, even though they were closeby in Atlanta, Georgia. But in 1997 she met Alan Hatch, an American, and married him. She had already moved to the U.S. and gotten naturalized, so when the 2004 Olympics rolled around, she wowed judges and won two silvers. Since then, she has coached and designed her own fashion line.
Kyla Ross
Kyla Ross along with her childhood friend, McKayla Maroney both competed as part of the “Fierce Five” on Team USA in the 2012 London Olympic Games, bringing back a gold medal in the team event. She later started going to school at UCLA, where she continued with gymnastics and competed on their collegiate team. The 11th NCAA gymnast to achieve a perfect score in 2019, she became only the second person with the distinction of earning perfect marks in a competition a week later.
Gabrielle Douglas
Gabrielle Douglas might never have gotten her start had her older sister not begun first. She taught the three-year-old and before a few years were done, Gabrielle had become a state champion in her native Virginia. She continued to make splashes as she grew older, and she helped the American team take home gold that year. The next Olympics, the 2016 Rio Games, Douglas took home another gold medal. That was the same year she starred in her own TV show, Douglas Family Gold, a reality show that ran for one season.
Jordyn Wieber
Jordyn Wieber won a gold medal in London at the 2012 Games, which became all the more impressive once she disclosed that she had developed a stress fracture which she soldiered through during the team event. She retired from professional gymnastics in 2015, but Wieber couldn’t be kept from the sport. In April 2019, during her senior year of college at the University of Arkansas, she became the first Olympic champion to take on the coaching job for the Arizona Razorbacks.
Bart Conner
Bart Conner took home two gold medals in 1984 for the American team, solidifying his place among the country’s preeminent gymnasts. He was inspired by Nadia Comaneci and arranged to appear on The Pat Sajak Show after learning that his idol was due to appear on it. The two hit it off and Comaneci was impressed by Conner. They started dating and married in 1996. He founded the Bart Conner Gymnastics Academy, which he runs with his fellow Olympian wife.
Summer Sanders
The first memory you may have of Summer Sanders might be when she appeared on TV as the host of a Nickelodeon show Figure It Out, which premiered in 1997. Her start, though, was winning four medals swimming at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. The camera liked her a lot and, with her experience as an Olympic champion, she is the perfect sports commentator. In fact, Sanders was still competing when she began giving commentary for various sporting events, but she’s since retired from competitive swimming.
Dara Torres
Dara Torres has more medals than most Olympians with 12 to her name, four of them gold. That’s more success than most of us can hope for, and she was only cut short when injuries forced her to stop. Torres had to undergo surgery for her knees and stopped competitive swimming. Ever since then, in 2012, she’s pursued modeling as a career, in addition to being a TV correspondent. Torres still swims as a celebrity swimmer for a cancer research-funding charity called Swim Across America.
Allison Schmitt
Allison Schmitt has won eight Olympic medals by swimming for the US team so far, and there’s a chance we’ll see even more medals in the future. In 2008’s Beijing Games, she won only a bronze medal, but in 2012 in London she won five medals. Three were gold and Schmitt helped set a world record in a relay race. Besides international competitions, she was a four-time NCAA swimming champion in the 200 and 500-yard races.
Ryan Lochte
Ryan Lochte has appeared in the media in recent years with several controversies, including one claim from the Brazilian police that the authorities vehemently denied and which cost him his spot on the US Team in the 2016 Rio Olympics. Despite this, he’s a champion swimmer that holds the record in the 200-meter and 400-meter individual medley. All in all, he has 12 Olympic medals to his name, six of them gold. Besides swimming, Lochte appeared on TV in 2019 for Celebrity Big Brother.
Katie Ledecky
American Katie Ledecky currently holds records in several races, the 1500-meter, 800-meter, and 400-meter freestyle. Throughout her career, she’s broken 14 world records, many of them her own, and Ledecky is still young enough to break more before she’s done. Just 15 when she debuted in London 2012, she won a gold medal in the 800-meter freestyle race. The next Olympics, the 2016 Rio Games, Ledecky won four more gold medals. In the voting for Associated Press’s Female Athlete of the Decade, only Simone Biles and Serena Williams came before her.
Chen Ruolon
Chen Ruolon is a powerhouse in the diving world, with five gold medals to her name, but injuries to her neck in 2016 have forced her out of competing for good, it seems. Ruolon has competed in three Olympics, though, and is one of only three Chinese athletes with five gold medals. The 10-meter dive is a serious one with a lot of competition, but she dove ahead of the other contenders and won a pair of gold at each of her Olympic appearances except for her final one.
Gary Hall Jr.
Just like his father and namesake, Gary Hall Jr. became an Olympic swimmer. He won five gold medals in three different Olympic Games, but may best be remembered because he used to warm up like a prizefighter. Completing his look with a robe and boxing shorts, Hall would even start shadow boxing and flexing for his fans. He got fined at the 2004 Games. These warm-ups came in handy when he saved his sister’s life in a shark attack by punching the animal repeatedly until it swam off.
Melissa “Missy” Franklin
American swimmer Melissa “Missy” Franklin won five gold medals and held a few records, some of which have since been broken. She debuted at the young age of 17 at the 2012 London Games, having had to make the tough choice of whether to represent Canada or the U.S., as she’s a citizen of both countries. Franklin won four of her five gold medals in her Olympic debut, snagging one more as part of the 200-meter freestyle relay. She retired from professional swimming in December 2018.
Janet Beth Evans
Janet Beth Evans was destined for great things, from the start sticking out from the competition with her unorthodox swimming style. This far-reaching “windmill” style helped her become a champion, despite being short for a swimmer. Evans won two gold medals at each of the 1988 Olympics and 1992 Games, solidifying her place in American swimming history by defeating larger competitors, some of whom were found to use illegal performance enhancers. Since then, Evans helped bring the Olympics back to the U.S., as the 2028 Games will take place in Los Angeles.
Ian Thorpe
Ian Thorpe is allergic to chlorine, so pursuing a career in competitive swimming might not have been what the doctor ordered when he first started off, but his talent was so undeniable once he debuted at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. He’s won five gold medals, the most of any Australian. The great Michael Phelps said Thorpe is a hero of his. Despite retiring from the sport, he remains one of the most popular athletes in the world. Thorpe is also an activist for LGBT rights. Besides his swimming career, he’s an ambassador for Armani.
Natalie Coughlin
Natalie Coughlin was an NCAA swimming champion before she entered the Olympics, and she truly shone at the 2004 Athens Olympics by winning two gold medals for the U.S. She is the first woman to swim the 100-meter backstroke race in under a minute, a feat accomplished at the following Olympics in Beijing. Besides modeling after her swimming career, she became CO2 Coconut Water’s spokeswoman and made TV appearances. Coughlin was a judge on Iron Chef America and competed on Chopped.
