The brave journey of Gabrielle Rose.

Decades after her last Olympics, a comeback season for the ages.

Swimmer Gabrielle Rose, before a race at the U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials in Indianapolis in June.

It’s an indelible image: Swimmer Gabrielle Rose, just before one of her races at the U.S. Olympic Trials in Indianapolis in June, is standing on the pool deck with her hand over her heart. The look on her face is hard to read behind her goggles. Focused? Nervous? Excited? But it’s her hand that gives the story away. It is the hand of a 46-year-old woman, a mother and a competitor who, we now know, was the oldest swimmer at the trials, by a long shot.

Rose, who grew up in Memphis and swam for Stanford University, went on to have the swims of her life in Indianapolis, bettering her personal best and progressing to the semifinals in both the 100 and 200 breast stroke. The remarkable part: This all happened decades after the last time she was an Olympian, in 2000, when she was 22.

But this is not a story about winning and losing, the way we’ll all come to define it in the weeks ahead as we watch the Olympics. The story of Gabrielle Rose’s comeback season is much more interesting than that.

“It was never about reigniting my swimming career or becoming a professional athlete,” she said. “It was very simple: Let’s set a hard goal and see what can happen.”

Gabrielle is thoughtful and modest, and says her swimming has always been intensely personal; she didn’t even tell her brother that she was thinking of chasing another Olympic Trials. You get the idea she’s still astounded and maybe a little uncomfortable with the gush of national coverage of her feats in Indianapolis — even Jen Psaki, a former collegiate swimmer, shouted her out on her MSNBC program that week.

Also, the end of Gabrielle’s earlier Olympic career was painful: After swimming for Brazil in 1996 and the USA in 2000, she didn’t qualify in 2004. She had been fighting mononucleosis in the weeks before the trials, though that wasn’t public at the time. She had no plans to try again, ever.

“I thought I wouldn’t be back because I was 26, and that was old at the time,” she said. Her voice thickening, she said, “I was really hard on myself … and thought I kind of didn’t deserve a second chance.”

In the years since, Rose has come back from injury, from divorce and from the loss of her father to cancer; she knows she can do hard things. She also has a 10-year-old daughter, Annie, who motivates her every day.  “She’s on the same team where I coach and swim, and, as a mom, I’m always thinking about the example I’m setting for her.”

It’s clear that Gabrielle knows exactly how old she is. And she has kept swimming.

“I was a true masters swimmer,” she said of her life in California several years ago. “I was coaching club swimmers, high school-age swimmers, and it brought me back to my love of swimming. I was thinking about swimming in a new way and appreciating the technical aspects in ways I hadn’t considered in years.

“I was a masters swimmer trying to set a high goal for myself.”

Still, she knew she was at least two seconds slower than the Olympic Trials standard, a huge gap to make up, especially at 46.

“Then in the spring of 2023, I went and did the Masters Spring Nationals and kind of had the meet of my life,” she said. “On the first day, I got a lifetime best in the 100-yard breast stroke. I didn’t think that was possible at my age.”

It was her coach who saw how close she was to the Olympic Trials time. “’You’re right there,’ he told me. So with that, I was able to make the jump and say, okay, let’s go for it.”

Everything this time was different, Gabrielle said, from the dolphin kick she was now allowed to use with her breast stroke to the blocks and her dive technique to the nonstop social media buzz. And, for the first time she could remember, she was chasing a cut, trying for a time standard that seemed far away.

“One of the hardest things for me to take on in that first meet was the nerves,” she said. “I was like, life is stressful enough, why am I doing this to myself?” But after each swim, she found, she was excited to do it again, learning and seeing what was possible.

“With age, I was able to think a little differently, and probably be more compassionate and patient with myself,” she said. “I’ve always been good about process with my swimming, but as a grown woman, the appreciation for the process was much deeper.”

Plus, this time she had a team of people around her, from her swim coach to a strength coach, physical therapist, sports psychologist and nutritionist.

 “When I was younger, I had a coach, but never this sense of team,” she said. “I needed each of them and we were doing this together. It was very, very moving — we were doing something special, and I felt tremendous support along the journey.”

When she finally arrived in Indianapolis, Gabrielle said, the energy of the arena felt overwhelming at times: “I hadn’t had experience racing at that level in so long.”

She gained strength by thinking of her daughter. “I thought, okay, we came here to do this job. I’ve got to be strong for my daughter. I’ve got to model this.”

And what about the hand-over-heart moment before each race? “That’s something I’ve always done. It’s something to calm my heart, to connect to my body, to connect to myself. It’s also gesturing to myself that I trust myself.”

How did it feel in the moment? During the first race when she swam a personal best, Gabrielle said, “I could feel the energy and I knew I was ahead … I think it hit me when I touched and I saw the one by my name and heard the cheering. I was like, oh my. Thank you, thank you. I had never had an experience of the crowd just being so generous and truly in support of me.”

Nearly a month after Indianapolis, Gabrielle was still processing all that the incredible experience meant in her life. She’s figured a few things out, too.

“We probably often underestimate ourselves, and one of the most common ways we do that is with age, telling ourselves this number has to mean we are limited in some capacity. I’ve really enjoyed this journey because it’s allowed me to experience things I didn’t dream were possible.”

Is there any part of her that’s even a tiny bit disappointed that she not swimming in the Olympics in Paris? It doesn’t seem like it.

“It was a joyful process,” she said. “The goal was the personal best, and that was enough. That was absolutely enough for me.”