When she touched the wall — when she saw she had finished eighth in the 100-meter freestyle race — Gabrielle Rose was devastated.

This was two decades ago, at the U.S. Olympic Team Swimming Trials. The top six swimmers made the relay team that would compete in Athens. Rose headed home.

“It was really hard,” she said. “I felt like a failure and a disappointment.”

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The 2004 Olympics in Athens were supposed to be a triumphant last hurrah for Rose, who swam for the U.S. in Sydney four years earlier. She had decided to invest four more years to try and get back to the Games — and win a medal this time around.

“But three weeks before the trials, I went to a swim meet and my times were remarkably off,” she said. “It was an effort even to finish a race. It turns out I had mono.”

Rose decided it was time to walk away from swimming. 

“I didn’t feel like I belonged in the swimming world anymore,” she said.

Two decades passed.

Rose went to the Stanford Graduate School of Business and had a daughter, Annie.

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U.S. swimmers competed in four subsequent Olympics — in Beijing, London, Rio and Tokyo.

This summer, the Olympics are in Paris. Swimmers from across the U.S. will gather in Indianapolis in June to try and make the team.

And who will be among them?

Gabrielle Rose, who is now, at 46, the oldest swimmer on record to ever qualify for the U.S. trials. 

‘I would have laughed at the idea’

It was just last April that Rose was back in Memphis, to celebrate the opening of the Mike Rose Aquatics Center.

Mike Rose — the dynamic CEO and University of Memphis booster who died of cancer in 2017 — had made it a final mission to develop a world-class aquatics center in his adopted home. Before he died, he identified his daughter, Gabrielle, as the person to see the project through.

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It would not be an easy task. The aquatics center became embroiled in political controversy.

But on April 17, 2023, Gabrielle Rose joined hundreds of others at the joyous grand opening.

Was she thinking, at that moment, that a year later she would be on the way back to the Olympic trials?

“Absolutely not,” she said. “I would have laughed at the idea.”

Understand, Rose was the Tennessee Scholar-Athlete of the Year — back in 1995.

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She first qualified to swim for Brazil at the Olympics — back in 1996.

Gretchen Walsh, a gifted U.S. swimmer from Nashville who will be competing at this year’s trials, wasn’t even born until 2003.

So exactly how did all this happen?

How did Rose — who walked away from swimming in disappointment two decades ago — find herself competing for the Olympics once again?

It’s actually connected to that aquatics project — and to her father, too.

“In 2016, when he was sick, he is the one who really urged me to go to the Olympic Games in Brazil,” she said. “I was on the fence about it, but he told me I should go. And that experience turned out to be really healing for me.”

The aquatics center project had even more of an impact.

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“It required me to come out as Gabrielle Rose, the swimmer, and really embrace that identity,” she said. “It was something I had put away, maybe to protect myself as much as anything else. But to spearhead the project, I had to be an Olympian again.”

Rose recommitted herself to swimming. She set multiple national records in her age group. And at last year’s U.S. Masters Swimming nationals, she found herself swimming as fast as she ever had.

“I was able to put it all together and had the swim meet of my life,” she said. “It broke through some of my limitations and it got me curious about what was possible.”

Could she really compete against swimmers half her age? Could she really hit the U.S. Olympic qualifying times in the 100-meter and 200-meter breaststroke at the age of 46?

Yes, it turns out.

Yes, she could.

At a meet last November, Rose swam the 100 breaststroke in 1 minute, 9.42 seconds, to get under the qualifying time of 1:10:29. Then she swam the 200 breaststroke in 2:31:68 to beat the qualifying standard by one-hundredth of a second.

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“I was thrilled, obviously,” she said. “I’m having so much fun, striving to be the best version of myself.”

That version includes coaching young swimmers — including 10-year-old Annie — at a swim club in Southern California, where Rose now lives and trains.

“It gives me a chance to experiment with different training methods,” she said. “Training is so different than it was when I was competing before. I’m putting a much bigger emphasis on strength training. I feel stronger and fitter than I ever have.”

Rose is still a long shot to make the Olympic team, of course. But all these years later, that really isn’t the point. 

“There is something to be said for striving for really high goals, for goals that scare you, goals that seem unreachable,” she said. “For me, there is something really meaningful about dreaming big — and accomplishing it.”