In Deep with Sarah Sjöström

In Deep with Olivia Smoliga — Season 2, Episode 1: Sarah Sjöström

There are athletes who win. And then there are athletes who change the entire shape of what winning can look like across a decade. Sarah Sjöström is the latter.

In this landmark first guest episode of In Deep, Olivia sits down with the most decorated female swimmer in World Championship history for a conversation that goes far beyond medals. Sarah holds 23 individual World Championship medals, six world titles in the 50 fly, and two Olympic gold medals from Paris 2024 — but what unfolds in this episode is something richer: a portrait of how one of the greatest athletes alive actually thinks.

The conversation moves through curiosity as a competitive force — Sarah traces how staying genuinely curious about what she's capable of, rather than fixating on outcomes, has quietly powered every major chapter of her career. She revisits the elbow injury that threatened her Tokyo Olympics, and how learning to celebrate incremental progress week by week wasn't just a mental strategy — it became a philosophy she's carried into motherhood and her return to training now.

Sarah and Olivia dig into the mental architecture behind elite performance: trusting your intuition when coaches and culture push you in another direction, keeping things simple when everything in sport tempts you to complicate them, the autonomy required to build a career that actually fits the athlete you are. Sarah also speaks candidly about visualization — including the vivid mental image of winning the 100 freestyle in Paris that preceded her decision to even enter the event — and what it means to detach from the result enough to perform freely.

This is also a conversation about identity and longevity — what it means to keep showing up as a swimmer at 30-something, why a broad life makes a better athlete, and the single piece of advice that Sarah has carried since 2011 that quietly reframed how she handles winning and losing.

For any swimmer navigating pressure, injury, comparison, or the quiet question of why am I still doing this — this one's for you.

New episodes of In Deep with Olivia Smoliga drop bi-weekly on Spotify.

Listen to the episode below!