2022 Swammy Awards: Comeback Award – Ruta Meilutyte, Lithuania

To see all of our 2022 Swammy Awards, click here.

2022 Comeback of the Year: Ruta Meilutyte, Lithuania

A new award for 2022, we figured it was about time to recognize the best comebacks of the year.

We were inspired to add this honor to the Swammy offerings because there were so many great comeback stories this year.

Comeback means different things to different people. It can mean a swimmer who has battled health issues, it can mean a swimmer whose results had taken a turn for the worse finding a second wind, it can mean a swimmer who peaked young, simmered, and finally broke through that ceiling again. It can mean all of those things, and sometimes multiple of those things at once.

Ruta Meilutyte had a career by the time she turned 18. Born in Lithuania, she moved to the UK at age 13 to train with famed British coach Jon Rudd. By age 15, she was Olympic champion in the 100 meter breaststroke. That kicked off an unparalleled run of results where she consecutively won an Olympic championship, a World Short Course Championship, a World Long Course Championship, a European Championship, a Youth Olympic Games gold medal, and a World Junior Championship in an intense two-year period. She set three World Records in 2013 alone, at just 16-years-old.

Her rise at such a young age happened in parallel to the rise of another 15-year-old who was doing things we’ve never seen before: American Katie Ledecky.

But by 2016, Meilutyte was battling crippling depression, saying she “(fought) every day against it.” She tried different coaches and cities, and in 2018, she said she considered retiring after the 2016 Olympics. She also developed an eating disorder.

“At that time, I was not happy with myself and at the same time had to go on with life and produce good results, ” she said. “I went into deep depression. It was the lowest point I went through.”

“Sometimes I wondered what I was doing with my life, because everything seemed meaningless,” she continued. “It was a loss of the perception of things, that made me discard the positive side of my life and focus only on the negative. And then I did not want to train or see people.”

Not long after that interview, she was given a two-year doping suspension by FINA for missing three doping control tests in a year, which she said was the result of her depression, and announced her retirement from competitive swimming at age 22.

But that suspension might be the best thing that could have happened to the now-25-year-old Meilutyte. It gave her the chance to work on her mental health, to seek therapy, and to find her identity not as the 15-year-old phenom, but as a human being.

When that suspension expired in summer 2021, she eased back into swimming. Each meet was done without a commitment to the next, starting in December 2021. She was fast in her first meet back, at a small domestic meet. Then she was convinced to attend Lithuania’s National Team camp without pressure to go to Worlds.

But then she did go to the World Championships in July, and she won a gold medal in the 50 breaststroke (her first World title in that event in long course), and a bronze medal in the 100 breaststroke.

Then she went to the FINA World Cup series, where she shattered the European Record in the 50 breast (short course), and crushed several U.S. Open Records.

Still, she wasn’t committed to the Short Course World Championships – until she was. She showed up in Melbourne, won the 50 breast title, and broke the World Record in the process.

Now the challenge renews for Meilutyte. She is again facing success, she again is on top of the swimming world, she again will feel the pressure of expectation. But she now has the tools to cope with those things: something that teenage Meilutyte didn’t always have. She has confidence, demonstrated by her April video protesting the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And she now understands herself, and what she needs to sustain success. She has proven that getting healthy in the mind is an asset, not a hindrance, to success, and that’s a lesson for us all.

Ruta has not committed to Fukuoka, Doha, or Paris, though she will be a medal favorite in any of them. But that’s okay. Every meet we get from Ruta at this point now feels like a bonus.

Honorable Mentions:

• Chad le Clos, South Africa – At 30 years old, Le Clos appeared to be on the back-end of his career: still a reliable ISL contributor, still a guy who could show up and race fast at a bunch of World Cup meets, but not necessarily a guy who was going to contend for gold medals at major international championships anymore. But then he found a new coach, joining Dirk Lange’s training group in Frankfurt. That seems to have brought him the focus and structure that it takes to be a world-class swimmer, and he won golds in the 100 and 200 butterflies (plus a new best time and African Record in the 100 fly) at the World Short Course Championships. He’ll now have to prove that return against a full field (Milak, Honda, etc.) and in long course to really turn heads, but he’s on the right track. South Africa is a breaststroker away from having a really good men’s medley relay, so even if he doesn’t win Paris 2024 medals individually, maybe that’s enough motivation for him.
• Marritt Steenbergen, Netherlands – The 22-year-old Steenbergen had an explosion this year, swimming best times in 16 different events. That led her to four gold medals at the European Championships, a gold medal in the 100 IM at the 2022 World Short Course Championships, a relay bronze at the World Aquatics Championships, and a pile of other medals to boot. 22 might feel too young to be a “comeback,” but Steenbergen’s story absolutely makes it fit. As a 15-year-old, she was the heir apparent to the Dutch women’s freestyle throne, but she then changed training from her home Friesland to the big center in Eindhoven, and her results stalled out for years. From 2015 through 2022, she didn’t swim a best time in the 100 free; the same is true of the 200 free from 2017-2022. That stall was credited to the mental weight of success at a young age. According to her coach Patrick Pearson, she struggled with another of injuries during that time, which he says were a result of her mental struggles. He credits her former coach Marcel Wouda with motivating her to continue swimming. Now Steenbergen is back in the spotlight, and in relatively-open medal races headed toward Paris, she is the serious contender she always projected to be.